Critics reviews

[Green Border] is a truly difficult watch, but a well-crafted one in the manner in which it shifts focus, using these personal stories to paint a larger picture... Holland’s direction is confident, and the camerawork here is consistently riveting in its balance of artistic composition and docudrama realism.

A gripping, visceral human drama that occasionally turns shakycam thriller to excellent effect, [Green Border is] a small victory for empathy over coarseness... [The film] demands that you witness the treatment of refugees with your own eyes.

Shot in [Holland's] blunt, razor-sharp, dispassionate, but immersive style—very little use of music or cinematic embellishment—much of [the film's] unpitying malice is unbearable and hard to watch... So unsettling in its realism, one often has to remind themselves the incisive portrait is not a documentary but a movie.

Green Border is a gruelling watch for much of its 147-minute runtime, and yet strangely it emerges not without hope... [This] is a powerful and necessary film.

Green Border is a tough watch: a punch to the solar plexus. But a vital bearing of cinematic witness to what is happening in Europe right now.

“Green Border” is a heart-in-mouth thriller set on the Polish-Belarusian border that wraps its social critique in the razor wire of punchy, intelligent cinematic craft... Every character, no matter how minor or how seemingly unworthy, is accorded a degree of private dignity which somehow avoids the pitfalls of both-sides-ism.

Green Border will likely become one of [Holland's] most important achievements, and rightly so. But it’s also a film which slides into frequent bouts of hand holding in its final hour, sermonizing a reality the horrors of its visuals say more effectively than any words ever could.

On the news and in cinema, there has been no shortage of footage and re-enactments of the agonies suffered every day by migrants and refugees. But Holland cunningly digs a little deeper here to explore the psyches of characters who might just be faceless heavies in other stories.

Despite biting off a bit more than it can chew, [Green Border is] an affecting introduction to a little-known crisis and the latest case of a master filmmaker showing us they can still do it.

Though Holland and co-writers Maciej Pisuk and Gabriela Lazarkiewicz-Sieczko have quite a lot of time at their disposal, the characterisation is minimal... What takes centre stage is the bad treatment [migrants] get at the hands of both sides but it’s hard to empathise with these characters, who are more avatars than humans in an all-too-familiar story.

There has been no shortage of films that deal with Europe’s current refugee crisis over the last decade or so. Still, [Green Border], with its supremely confident handling of a fractured, fragmented structure and its twin driving forces of compassion and fury, is undoubtedly one of the best.

At 144 minutes, and in black and white, it is not exactly a Trojan horse, and its moral rigor does not come with a spoonful of sugar. But Green Border earns every second of that running time, and with a focus and energy that belies its director’s age.