Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.That cinema still matters enough to enrage governments was proved last year by the respected Polish director Agnieszka Holland. The film was Green Border, a stark account of the refugee crisis at Poland’s border with Belarus. The premiere took place at September’s Venice Film Festival. By then, the Polish justice minister Zbigniew Ziobro had already attacked it. In the first of a loud wave of anger from ministers, Green Border was, he said, comparable to Third Reich propaganda. Ziobro, it emerged later, had not actually seen the film. The administration of which he was a part has since given way to that of Donald Tusk. But the disaster at the border continues, and recent European elections have only cranked up the temperature of debate.Like Matteo Garrone in his recent film Io Capitano, Holland sets out to give human faces to the headlines, statistics and political soundbites. Her focus is a Syrian family whom we first see happily onboard a plane bound for Europe. It is late 2021, and the family having escaped Isis, the cruellest joke has been played on all concerned by Alexander Lukashenko. In a dramatic device taken whole from the news pages, the Belarusian president has seeded word among refugees that on arrival in his country, they will be able to cross unimpeded into Poland, and the EU beyond.From here, almost all the film duly takes place within running distance of the spiral of razor wire that marks the Polish border. In winter forest and swamp, the group are plunged into a scene that would be farcical if not so harrowing — they and others are illegally “pushed back” from Poland, then brutally returned once more to the EU by Belarusian troops. And so on.Dramatically, the film is deftly structured. Holland also widens her lens to map the schism the crisis opens up among Polish people themselves. In the US and UK, similar strength of feeling means some audiences will now consider Green Border with their minds made up in advance. They do, however, have the chance to buck the example of Zbigniew Ziobro and judge first hand.★★★★☆In UK and US cinemas from June 21
