Polish director and scriptwriter Agnieszka Holland was born in Warsaw in 1948. After graduating from FAMU in Prague in 1971, she began her film career working as an assistant director of Krzysztof Zanussi and was mentored by Andrzej Wajda. Her first feature film was Provincial Actors (1978), winner of the International Critics Prize at the Festival de Cannes in 1980. Throughout her work life, Holland has been nominated for Academy Awards three times: for Angry Harvest (1985), Europa Europa (1990), and In Darkness (2011). Holland’s numerous features include Olivier, Olivier (1992), The Secret Garden (1993), Total Eclipse (1995), Julie Walking Home (2001), Spoor (2017), Mr. Jones (2019), and Charlatan (2020), among others. She has also directed episodes of many notable television series, including Treme and House of Cards.
In the treacherous and swampy forests that make up the “green border” between Belarus and Poland, refugees from the Middle East and Africa trying to reach the European Union are trapped in a geopolitical crisis cynically engineered by Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko. The lives of Julia, a newly minted activist who has given up her comfortable life; Jan, a young border guard; and a Syrian family — all of them pawns in this hidden war — intertwine.