Agnieszka Holland, 74, has spent the last decade directing movies that equal or outstrip her classic Europa Europa (1990), the real-life story of a Jewish Candide who survives the Holocaust when he lands in an elite school for Hitler Youth. Burning Bush (2013), an HBO Europe production about the repercussions of a student’s setting himself on fire to protest the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, may be the best mini-series this century. Her one-of-a-kind biopic, Mr. Jones (2019), filters the Stalin-created famine that blighted Ukraine in the 1930s through the hyper-sensitive eyes of Gareth Jones, the journalist who broke the story to a disbelieving world.
Now comes the bristling, emotionally engulfing Green Border, Holland’s epic dramatization of the refugee crisis bloodily unfolding where Russian satellite Belarus meets the E.U.’s Poland. The film received raves at the Venice Film Festival, a slot at the New York Film Festival (it plays October 4 and 5), and condemnation from the current, right-wing Polish government.
