This is an emotionally charged, deeply troubling drama about the struggles of families displaced by war to resettle in the safety of Western Europe. Arriving by land over the Polish border from Belarus, they should by rights be able to claim asylum and be placed in a detention center until the merits of their case are heard. Instead, they are rounded up and dumped back on the eastern side of the barbed wire fence with as much brutality as the guards can muster. And then the game begins again. Veteran Agnieszka Holland — whose prolific career runs the gamut from The Secret Garden to In Darkness and episodes of The Wire and House of Cards — approaches the story from several different vantage points, including the refugees’ perspective and the guards’, but you will never doubt where her moral conscience lies. Shot in stark black and white, this is utterly compelling cinema; a timely, vehement denunciation of resurgent fascism and the quiescence which enables it.
Special Jury Prize, Venice 2023
Community Partner
Jalal Altawil, Maja Ostaszewska, Tomasz Włosok, Behi Djanati Atai, Mohamad Al Rashi, Dalia Naous
Poland/Czech Republic/France/Belgium
2023
Showcase
In Polish, English and Arabic with English subtitles
Violence, Depictions of Racism
Book Tickets
Indigenous & Community Access
Indigenous Access Tickets Community Access Tickets Ticket Donation Requests
Credits
Executive Producer
Mike Downey, Jeff Field
Producer
Fred Bernstein, Agnieszka Holland, Marcin Wierzchoslawski
Screenwriter
Agnieszka Holland, Gabriela Lazarkiewicz-Sieczko, Maciej Pisuk
Cinematography
Tomasz Naumiuk
Original Music
Frederic Vercheval
Director
Agnieszka Holland
Agnieszka Holland is a three-time US Academy Award nominee (for Angry Harvest; Europa, Europa and In Darkness). She directed her first feature, Provincial Actors, in 1978. Since the 1990s she has worked regularly in the United States on films like Total Eclipse, Copying Beethoven and Mr Jones, and on TV series like The Wire, House of Cards, The Killing and Treme.
Filmography: Europa, Europa (1990); The Secret Garden (1993); Washington Square (1997); In Darkness (2011); Charlatan (2020)
Missing VIFF? Check out what's playing at the VIFF Centre
The Graduate
In The Graduate Benjamin (Dustin Hoffman, 30 playing 20 with masterly understatement) comes home from college and is surprised to be seduced by the wife of his father's business partner, Mrs Robinson (Anne Bancroft).
blur: To the End
Now in their late 50s, Britpopsters blur (of Song 2 fame) do a celebratory lap of Great Britain culminating in their first ever Wembley Stadium show in this appealing observational doc. A companion piece to the concert film Live at Wembley Stadium.
Midnight Cowboy
Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman are street hustlers on different ends of the innocence / experience spectrum who establish something more than a business partnership in the seedy world of late 60s New York City in John Schlesinger's New Hollywood classic.
Sinners
This year's unexpected box office sleeper is that rare beast, a genre movie full of bold invention and surprise. We are in Mississippi in the early 1930s, and the opening of a new blues joint on the edge of town is the signal for all hell to break out.
The Headless Woman
The pictures tell the story -- and you better not blink -- when Veronica (the superb Maria Onetto) hits something on the road home. But what? She is too traumatized, or panic-stricken, to go back and look, and her fears are too terrible to acknowledge.