- 1 The research for this paper was supported by the Erasmus+ project 2023-1-DE01-KA220-HED-000154375, (...)
1Managing massive migration flows is one of the most significant challenges both in the United States and in Europe. Interpreted in terms of Arjun Appadurai’s ethnoscapes, this constantly shifting worldwide landscape of people shapes both global dynamics and local politics, influencing cultural identities and perceptions of space, place, and community (“Disjuncture and Difference”). Appadurai argues that it is the work of imagination that is at the center of all globalization processes, and imagination is shaped by media flows (Modernity at Large). The processes of mass migration challenge the stability of the concepts of identity and border, and are likely to trigger pervasive violence. Similar imaginaries of migration are created in different parts of the world, even though they may have various shapes and forms. While American ethnoscapes originate from an economic and political context that is strikingly different from the one in which global human flows make their impact on Poland, discursive constructions of migration in the U.S. and Polish media, including the cinema, bear striking similarities.
2The key text in the comparative analysis presented in this essay is Agnieszka Holland’s Green Border (2023), which will be discussed along with two American texts addressing the migration across the U.S.-Mexico border, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005) and the experimental short project Carne y Arena (Virtually present, Physically invisible) (2017). Set against these American stories, the analysis reveals that the Polish film relies on familiar tropes and visual conventions to address the issues of borders, migration, and hospitality. However, it also diverges from Hollywood models emphasizing the moral dilemmas of border activism and offering a naturalistic view of the trauma caused by illegal border crossings.
3Our major premise for this comparison is the argument voiced, among others, by Paul Ganster that the U.S.-Mexico border “is the best-known illustration of the paradoxical continued importance of borders in our globalizing world” and “[t]here are many ways in which the U.S.-Mexican border provides a paradigmatic case of global border development” (xvi).1 The U.S.-Mexico border has become a point of reference in border studies research and has also been extensively present in various cultural and literary representations. Gloria Anzaldúa in the famous description included in her Borderlands/La Frontera, describes it as “una herida abierta [an open wound] where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds” (25), thus representing it “as a site of historical trauma that continues to affect the present experiences of individuals and communities” (Premo Steele). One such characteristic of the border illustrated in its multiple representations is the dividing power that separates the spaces that have shared a common history and used to be one. As Ganster aptly notes, “[t]he economies of the region and its inhabitants share a common history of boom-and-bust cycles, migration within and between nation-states, and intense sociocultural blending and assimilation” (11) and, in fact, “[t]he immigration problem is a creation of the twentieth century. From 1848 until the end of the nineteenth century, the border was not patrolled and migration across it concerned few people” (215). The 20th and 21st centuries have been witnessing new waves of immigrants attempting to cross the Mexican-American border, leading to a significant intensification of anti-immigrant sentiments accompanied by legal acts and regulations of the same kind, which has turned the U.S-Mexico border into one of the most militarized borders in the world. The purpose of the first part of this article is to analyze two cinematic representations of migration across the U.S.-Mexico border and examine how The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005) and Carne y Arena (2017) tackle these issues, challenging or revising stereotypical portrayals of that space and the act of border crossing.
4The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada is a 2005 film written by Guillermo Arriaga and directed by Tommy Lee Jones (who also happens to play one of the main characters in the story). The plot revolves around the figure of the Anglo-American hero, Pete (Tommy Lee Jones), who searches explanation for the unknown circumstances of the death of the titular Melquiades, a Mexican migrant worker, and subsequently executes revenge for “Mel” Estrada’s unjust and untimely death as well as seeks redemption both for himself and for the murderer.
5The film is described as a contemporary or revisionist western, yet it comprises a few classical tropes that have contributed to the stereotypical image of the U.S.-Mexico border, border crossers, and migration. They include the aforementioned hero figure, who in that case can be described as a white savior. Pete guides the audience through a journey of redemption, but at the same time complicates the notion of heroism through his emotional subjectivity. The viewers learn about Melquiades and his story through Pete’s perspective, which is misleading, as his account is unreliable, since it is highly influenced by emotions and limited to what information Pete obtained from Mel (which turns out to be only partially true in the end). Another example of a stereotypical rendition of the border is the representation of nature as wilderness that is perilous for those who venture into it and as such should be conquered, which is in line with Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier myth. Matthew Carter argues in his analysis of The Three Burials that
The film addresses these thematic concerns in terms of frontier mythology through its recourse to certain tropes, formulas, and stereotypes of the cinematic Western: the hero’s “Code,” the revenge motif, the shootout, the cowboy, horses, guns, the physical location of the Southwest desert and the Rio Grande, and the journey into a Mexico of the North American Imaginary (de Orellana 1993, 7).
6Therefore, even though the film’s purpose is the critique of the Anglo-American narrative that traditionally glorifies conquest and racial supremacy, it does not avoid, in some aspects, perpetuation of the border doxa created by the mainstream discourse.
7However, it has to be noted that apart from a few formulaic ideas, the film consistently challenges in multiple ways the Anglo-American myth of the frontier endorsed by Hollywood. Carter shares this view, maintaining that “[n]ot only does Three Burials explode such stereotypes—it explodes the whole notion of a ‘border’ through its presentation of various characters and their relationships, all of which cross ‘borders’ of one kind or another: marital, lawful, political, social, economic, cultural, or racial” (1). What Carter suggests is also the illustration of the evolution of the border that the film provides from the demarcation line to the borderscape that allows transnational exchange and dialogue. Therefore, the border in the film is not presented as a dividing line solely—at times it becomes permeable and porous, though the viewer can also see the signs of its upcoming militarization. This space is represented more as the borderlands, an interdependent space—the idea which is reinforced in the film by what Carter calls “intersectionalism” and “transnationalism” (5). The two concepts are illustrated by interrelations between characters and spaces from both sides of the border. The viewer gets to know this complex interdependence gradually, due to non-linear narrative: the plot goes back and forth between “contemporary” time and flashbacks to past events, which resembles the process of border crossing itself. The flashbacks are experienced mainly by Pete when he reminisces about meeting Mel and by Mike Norton (Barry Pepper)—“a bigoted and sexually frustrated agent of the Border Patrol” (Carter 4) who recollects the shootout leading to Melquiades’s death. As the story is revealed, the viewer becomes gradually familiar with how all the characters interact and are connected. One of such symbolic connections between both characters and the two sides of the border is Mel’s death, as Melquiades appears to have been (accidentally) killed by Norton. Apart from that, two female characters—Rachel, a waitress in the local diner, and Lou Ann, Norton’s wife—have at some point in the story a double date with Pete and Mel, which both illustrates the aforementioned marital border crossing and implies versatility of borders that the characters traverse in this story. Such interrelations between characters from both sides of the border also defy the stereotypical representations of the border as a separating line. Conversely, they suggest the multiplicity of interactions that take place in this space. This idea is also reinforced by the dialogism of two languages used in the borderlands—English and Spanish (both in dialogues and in chapter titles). As Carter argues, such a representation “actively confuses the concept of national identity” (7) conventionally associated with supposedly stable nation-states with fixed borders and “it does this by highlighting the arbitrary nature of such identities in as much as they are defined historically by culture and race, and geopolitically through borders” (7).
8Moreover, in its attempt to challenge the stereotypical representation of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands that is often presented in westerns, which Carter describes as “a tawdry form which endlessly replicates the mythic binarism and triumphalism of Anglo-American frontier narratives” (5), the director does not hesitate to bring to light “uncomfortable” issues related to the border and border crossing. He openly shows “‘brutalisation of border jumpers’ at the hands of the Border Patrol” (Carter 4) and gratuitous violence of the agents, for example, when one of them breaks la curandera’s nose during the chase after the group of border crossers. He also presents the process of dehumanization of migrants—when Mel is buried, his grave only bears the name “Melquiades from Mexico;” there is no last name provided, as if it did not exist. This is often true about migrants who die during the border crossing and their names are never retrieved so their families in the country of their origin will never learn about the fate of their relatives who disappeared in search of a better life. The director also undertakes the issue of corruption among law enforcement. It is illustrated by the situation when Sheriff Belmont (Dwight Yoakam) and Border Patrol Captain Gomez (Mel Rodriguez) decide to ignore the abuse of power at the hands of Norton and not pursue him for killing Mel. It has to be noted that this controversial question of power abuse and corruption on the side of the government’s officers has not been addressed for a long time in mainstream productions, but since The Three Burials was released more and more works have undertaken this topic, including the series The Bridge (2013–2014), or a documentary Casa en tierra ajena (2017).
- 2 This is the comment that Ana Manzanas made during the discussion at the “Media in America. America (...)
9Finally, el viaje, the journey, plays an important role in creating the reversed or revised image of the border. In The Three Burials, it is not Mel’s journey al otro lado (to the other side) that comes to the forefront, but Pete’s and Norton’s trip to Mexico becomes more prominent. The viewer accompanies them through the perils of the journey typically experienced by the migrants attempting to cross to the U.S., including a Border Patrol chase and a dangerous trek through the mountains. We also witness the assistance they get from a coyote and the random people they meet on their way. The journey is thus like a reversed odyssey of a migrant. Moreover, in one of the flashbacks, we hear Mel describing his place in Mexico to Pete, and his account resembles stereotypical stories migrants share about the U.S., where the streets are paved (unlike in many places in the countries of their origin) and the trees metaphorically grow dollars instead of leaves. In Mel’s description, Mexico is a place of exceptional beauty and pristine nature. Even though in the end his home in Mexico turns out to be the creation of Mel’s imagination, as is his family from the photograph, it is also the place of Pete’s and Norton’s redemption. And the very story of the imagined home also contributes to the ambiguity of the story, as it is never explained whether the woman from the photograph has been a complete stranger to Mel, a neighbor from the village, or his lover. The reversal of a typical migrant story is also seen in the images of the houses presented in the film. As Ana Manzanas noted in her commentary,2 Mel’s house in the U.S. is solid, made of stone, unlike the ruins of “his” place in the Mexican village. It also stands in stark contrast to Norton’s trailer house, which exudes the atmosphere of temporariness and impermanence and raises the question who the real stranger in the borderlands actually is.
10The Three Burials is “one of a small but growing number of films that offer an imaginative and a highly-critical reassessment of the mythology of the American frontier as the Anglo-centric ‘story of the United States’ by intentionally foregrounding the formal and thematic limitations of its terms” (Carter 5) and thus presenting a more complex image of that space, including various aspects of the “legacy of conquest” (Carter 2). Through a nonlinear narrative and an exploration of moral ambiguity, the film repositions the border as a permeable, interconnected space rather than a rigid barrier. The borderlands become the gray area (the concept reinforced through desaturated colors) and the U.S.-Mexico border is reimagined not as a fixed, militarized line of separation, but as a fluid, morally complex space shaped by cultural interdependence, memory, and loss. Thus the film deconstructs the concept of the border represented in dominant Anglo-American narratives and instead presents the borderlands as a dialogic, intersectional zone.
11The second project on the U.S.-Mexico border to be discussed in this part is Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Carne y Arena (Virtually present, physically invisible) (2017). Carne y Arena is defined as “a virtual reality installation” (Fondazione Prada) or “an immersive mixed reality installation” (Raessens 634) that dissolves the traditional spectator-film boundary, enabling participants to feel the physical and emotional vulnerability of migrants. As the description of the project reads, “Based on true accounts, the superficial lines between subject and bystander are blurred and bound together, allowing individuals to walk in a vast space and thoroughly live a fragment of the refugees’ personal journeys” (Fondazione Prada). The project “premiered at the 70th Cannes Film Festival as the first virtual reality project to be featured in the festival’s history” (PHI Studio)—afterwards, it travelled through different places all over the world, including Cannes, Milan, Mexico City, Los Angeles, Washington, and Amsterdam (Raessens 639).
12What lies behind the project, in the director’s words, are the stories of real people— border crossers:
‘During the making of this project, I had the privilege of meeting and interviewing many Mexican and Central American refugees,’ Iñárritu said. ‘Their life stories haunted me, so I invited some of them to collaborate with me on the project. My intention was to experiment with VR technology to explore the human condition in an attempt to break the dictatorship of the frame—within which things are just observed—and claim the space to allow the visitor to go through a direct experience walking in the immigrants’ feet, under their skin, and into their hearts.’ (PHI Studio)
13The idea to simultaneously relate the migrants’ stories and transfer their experience to the viewer-participant turns the installation into a “semi-fictionalized ethnography” (Fondazione Prada) that involves an individual journey through three rooms. As Joost Raessens relates, “The first is a waiting room, the second is the central VR part where you undergo a six-and-a-half-minute solo experience, and the third room where you are invited to reflect on your experience” (636).
14Fatima Bhutto, a Pakistani writer and columnist born in Kabul, and an immigrant herself, relates this experience of participation in Carne y Arena in her short story “Flesh and Sand” published in a collection The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives. She describes the procedures of entering the room, reading instructions, and the beginning of the journey across the border that resembles detention in la hielera, the icebox, where the migrants caught by the Border Patrol are kept, which she describes as “the concrete holding cell” (Bhutto 54). This experience is supposed to unnerve and unsettle the participant, as it takes place in complete darkness with the shift in temperature from mild to freezing cold and the transition from silence to thunderous noise made by a helicopter surveilling the border. She recalls it in the following manner:
Inarritu designed the simulation to be experienced alone. Each visitor must enter and travel through the director’s landscape of Mexican-American border, by themselves, helpless and undefended. …
I enter through a dark room and am told to read Inarritu’s welcome message and follow the instructions through a dark warehouse. There is no exhibition map, no clue as to when the real will fade away to the virtual. I don’t remember if it is quiet or if there is music because I am aware, suddenly, that I’m alone. I walk toward a door and open it. Along the walls are steel benches. The room is white, lit by bright halogen lamps. Everywhere along the floor—under the benches, in the corner, gathered in small piles—are shoes. There are men’s sandals, dust marking the soft pads where toes once pressed against the leather, large moccasins without any soles, women’s broken high heels, a baby’s rubbery tennis shoe. …
I take off my shoes and put them in the locker. I have no idea how long I have been in the icebox but now I’m cold. They will tell me afterward it’s only about two minutes. I sit on the steel bench and pull my legs up to rest my bare feet on the edge, hugging my knees to my chest, like I did when I was at school and didn’t want to play. There is no clock. I have no phone. (51; 53; 54)
15In the process, one also meets other migrants and a coyote; there are additional noises, including crying people or barking dogs. The prevailing feeling, as Bhutto describes it, is fear. It aggravates with the progress of the journey, when the participant encounters more dangers, including, for example, hiding from the surveilling helicopter, escaping the attacking dogs or Border Patrol agents with guns pointing at the participants. Bhutto recalls:
Birds glide through the sky and people walk all around me, slowly, wearily, their feet dragging. And then there is the beating sensation of a helicopter in the sky and my body moves instinctively to find safety from it. When I look at my feet I can see the earth rustling, blown into the air by the movement of the helicopter’s blades. I can feel the pulsing of those blades in my eardrums. …
I can hear a child cry, he’s next to me, near me, as two jeeps of border patrol guards come out of nowhere. A German Shepherd is barking, spitting, and a man pointing a semiautomatic in my face. (58)
16In Bhutto’s case, she relates that experience to her own story of a political immigrant forced to flee subsequent countries where she has lived and to cross multiple borders in her life.
17What is completely new in the project is the perspective: a viewer becomes a participant—there is no division intrinsic to the classical act of watching the film, where the audiences are passive in the sense that they can only watch the film. In Carne y Arena, these lines are blurred as shown above. It is reinforced by the performative aspect of this simulation, since owing to that, the experience involves all the senses: the participants walk across the desert barefoot; they can feel the sand, the cold, and they hear all the noises. Moreover, touching a migrant triggers the beating of their heart, which is a measure introduced on purpose by the director to evoke empathy and solidarity with the migrants. As Bhutto comments on that: “Any contact with the migrants in this VR landscape sets off their beating hearts, a reminder to us spectators that somewhere, these people are real” (57), which is an important reminder, since, as the subtitle suggests, the migrants attempting to cross the borders are oftentimes “virtually present” and “physically invisible.” The image of an overturned boat on the Mediterranean Sea that appears towards the end of the journey points to analogies that exist in the experiences of migration across the world.
18Joost Raessens analyzing Carne y Arena addresses the aforementioned shift in the perspective and claims that it “positions its users not as spectators but as visitors and participants, thereby turning the ‘distant’ sufferer to a ‘close and proximate’ sufferer” (635). Drawing on Lilie Chouliaraki’s division of television viewers that she includes in The Spectator of Suffering, he argues that in Carne y Arena “[t]he viewer is slowly turned [from a bystander] into a participant” (638), which allows to make the most of the experience, as “[b]y combining the perspectives of ‘visitor’ and ‘participant,’ Iñárritu ensures that your experience is neither too detached nor too engaged” (638). He continues his explanation: “merely taking the visitor’s perspective would be too voyeuristic and aloof, but a constant first-person perspective—putting yourself in a migrant’s shoes—would be too stressful and make you want to reject the situation. A combination of both is the most important condition for empathy to take place” (638). Accomplishment of empathy in the viewer is the gist of the project, also according to the director. With this project, he wants to challenge stereotypical representations of border crossers as “the Other” and the potential threat to the integrity of the nation-state. At the same time, it has to be noted that Iñárritu does not sentimentalize the characters of migrants. They are based on real people, and they convey their own stories, and the purpose is for the viewer-participant to identify with them, but without depriving them of agency in the process, by showing excessive pity.
19Raessens in his analysis, suggests that in Carne y Arena this empathy can be achieved when “[t]he safe and comfortable context of the living room is turned into three different spaces where the visitor-participant experiences the same kind of vulnerability as the migrants in the scene” (639). Addressing the “modes of television news discourses” (639), he once again evokes Chouliaraki and her categorization into “three groups of news texts … adventure, emergency and ecstatic news” (639) which define the relationships between the spectator and the sufferer presented in this news. According to Raessens, “ecstatic news leads to the highest point of pity, where spectators identify themselves with the sufferers, people ‘like them’” (640) and therefore, as he claims,
[t]he ecstatic mode is of relevance for Carne y Arena because it emphasizes the proximity between spectator and sufferer. Just as in ecstatic news, Carne y Arena is based upon raw facts, unstaged reality, showing things as they really are; a local tragedy with global meaning; suffering in the order of lived experience but understood within a political and historical framework; details of the location, and human beings with a face. The installation as a whole makes the user feel, think, and act, and enables them to overcome—if only for a short moment—the ‘inescapable otherness’ of television news by being positioned as a visitor and participant, and, when we enter somebody’s heart, to actually become one of them. (640)
20Raessens suggests here that “VR can actually bridge the gap between real and mediated experience and arrive at a form of ‘post-symbolic communication’” (641). I argue that it is possible, but only to a certain extent, and as viewers-participants, we will never be able to experience the aforementioned “same kind of vulnerability as the migrants in the scene” (639), and claims otherwise may lead to the colonization of this experience. I understand that the idea behind the project is not to impersonate migrants, but identify with them, yet the border (nomen est omen) between these two may be dangerously thin. Therefore, I would argue that participation in such projects requires a reasonable dose of self-awareness and self-consciousness. Raessens also seems to verify his enthusiastic approach at the end of his analysis, when in the conclusion he admits: “Although this installation can of course by no means ever match the actual, life-threatening refugee experience itself, it brings important prerequisites of pure communication a big step closer to becoming a reality” (644). For me, another major concern with Carne y Arena is its elitist character, as it was only shown in selected (and ticketed) venues mentioned before, and thus not available to general audiences to the extent other forms of artistic representations of borders and migrations can be. Nevertheless, it has to be admitted that despite that, Iñárritu’s project has contributed greatly to the discussion on borders and migrations, taking the viewers-participants out of their comfort zones in a completely new manner and provoking them to reconsider stereotyping discourses othering migrants and border crossers. Its aim to challenge “the spatial division of “U.S.” versus “T.H.E.M.” as represented in the map of the poster for Carne y Arena” (Raessens 644) aligns with the evolution of the concept of the border—from the line that divides to the space that generates conviviality. Finally, the new mode of VR technology that Iñárritu deploys in Carne y Arena opens up a possibility to employ new technologies, including, for example, video games, and thus obtain new instruments to continue the battle to challenge discriminatory discourses and practices.
21Agnieszka Holland’s poignant account of the experience of migrants in Green Border (2023) has attracted considerable attention of not only film scholars but also politicians and activists. As the first Polish movie dealing extensively with the topic of migration crisis and border crossing, Green Border caused an unprecedented political controversy even before it was screened. It was fiercely attacked by the political right and the state-controlled media for its criticism of the contemporary government’s handling of the migration crisis, with Holland termed a national traitor and the film being compared to Nazi propaganda (see, for example, Węglarczyk, Zygiel, Ambroziak, Gera).
22Green Border directly confronts the realities of a specific and highly politicized ethnoscape: the Belarusian-Polish border. Holland’s movie offers an emotionally riveting picture of the border, where refugees from the Middle East, Asia, and Africa are trapped in a mad circle of illegal crossings and pushbacks, victims of the provocative policy of Alexander Lukashenko and the anti-immigration stand of the Polish government. The political ideologies of the Belarusian and Polish governments, viewing refugees as tools or threats rather than human beings, are powerful ideoscapes that directly determine the conditions of the space in which the migrants find themselves. Lured to Belarus under false pretenses and then trapped in the hostile borderland, the refugees are forcibly moved back and forth in the space in which they experience extreme precarity and trauma. Their journeys are not about voluntary migration or tourism; they are about survival and a desperate quest for safety and a better life, highlighting the violent aspects of contemporary global human movements.
23Although its setting is geographically and culturally different, the Polish movie uses a number of tropes and visual conventions that have contributed to the stereotypical image of the U.S.-Mexico border, border crossers, and migration in American cinema. First, it is again the motif of a journey, this time the migrants’ journey to the European Union, which contributes to the creation of a new image of the Polish border and the borderlands in the Podlasie region. Holland’s film reconstructs the image of the area previously mostly associated with the natural beauty of the primeval forest and with the complicated ethnic and religious history of the communities inhabiting the area. Now Białowieża and Podlasie become sites of global migration, violence, and fierce political rivalry in which migrants are involuntarily involved. However, in Green Border, the journey is not linear. The unfortunate travelers are caught in a cyclical movement, pushed across the border by Belarusians, and then pushed back by the Polish Border Guard, helplessly imprisoned in a hostile and threatening setting.
24Green Border is similar to The Three Burials and other American movies in representing the borderlands in terms of a perilous, dangerous environment. Here, it is the forest that does not just create a physical obstacle, but rather constitutes a deadly trap for anyone who wants to cross it. In the fall season, it offers no shelter and leaves the migrants vulnerable to low temperatures, lack of water and food. The forest is boggy, hard to penetrate with no beaten tracks and dense vegetation. In this context, the movie’s title is doubly ironic. On the one hand, “green border” is a term for a weakly protected section of the national border, the film’s possible allusion to the crossings of the “green border” to the West as a past experience of Poles during the Communist times. However, the use of “green,” which in many cultures symbolizes hope, seems incongruous. The opening sequence gives an aerial view of the green Białowieża Forest, but it quickly fades into gray, as the rest of the film is shot in black and white, which helps to build the dominant depressing mood of the film’s narrative and its quasi-documentary character.
25Holland places migrants in the center of the film’s story. They have a voice, speak their native languages, share their tragic life histories with each other, and, consequently, with the viewers. There are elements of a documentary genre, as in the scene when the activists, in the middle of the forest, interview individual migrants in front of a camera. The viewer learns the reasons for their journeys: the war in Syria, political persecution in Afghanistan, the desire for a safe and free life in Europe. We learn that they are predominately motivated by fear, and fear is the most significant element of the emotional environment of the protagonists and the feeling which the viewers find hard to escape from. They initially come to Belarus with a shared view of what Arjun Appadurai calls an “imagined world,” the hope of an easy passage to a safe life in the European Union. Instead, the migrants become pawns in a geopolitical game. The ethnoscape of the “green border” is marked by brutality, deception, and dehumanization, shattering their initial hopes.
26Green Border offers a vivid representation of the condition of precarity as theorized by Judith Butler. Butler defines precarity as a “politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death” (25). The film’s migrant protagonists, a Syrian family and an Afghan woman, Leila (Behi Djanati Atai), are stranded in the forest and brutally treated on both sides of the border, denied access to basic care and legal protection. Their politically manufactured vulnerability leads to what Butler calls “ungrievable lives,” where suffering is hidden from public concern, because it is excluded from the dominant frame of what is recognized as humanity (xv). Holland’s film challenges the viewer’s sense of ethical responsibility. Foregrounding the shared human fragility, Green Border re-frames precarious lives of migrants, giving them visibility and making their lives “grievable.”
27However, similarly to the Hollywood representations of the U.S.-Mexico border, Holland’s narrative largely deprives the migrants of basic agency. They are made to move as a result of large-scale political processes. They are literally pushed around, as pawns in the political struggle they are hardly aware of. Their survival is possible only due to the intervention of the white saviors, the activists, who provide them with instructions, direct their movements, save them—at least some of them—challenging the state apparatus and displaying heroism through these actions. The migrants, on the other hand, become heroic only through their suffering and acts of kind-heartedness. This is emphasized by the film’s cinematography: the border crossers are objects of observation, as the camera does not adopt their point of view, but follows them in their movements, presenting their weakening bodies for the viewers’ scrutiny.
28While ethnoscapes primarily concern mobile populations, Appadurai also points to how global flows of migration disrupt, transform, and destabilize traditional community structures by dislodging people, practices, and identities from their traditional locales (Modernity at Large 27–30). Green Border addresses these issues through the subplots centering on the Polish characters. Jan (Tomasz Włosok), the young border guard, is a loyal member of a state apparatus designed to control the borderlands. However, witnessing and participating in the violent actions against the migrants, he suffers an internal conflict which leads him to an act of defiance. Julia (Maja Ostaszewska), the psychologist seeking internal peace in a region of Poland where she expected to find solace after the death of her husband, suddenly finds herself challenged by the precarious presence of migrants in the borderlands. She chooses to help the migrants, defying the law and risking her own safety, demonstrating how the appearance of a new ethnoscape can redefine identities and create a transformed sense of solidarity.
- 3 Derrida defines this concept in his essays “Hostipitality,” in which he explains the potential of h (...)
29The movie shows migration as a process which disturbs the stability of the concept of national identity; in Green Border, global problems affect life of individuals living in the eastern peripheries of Poland, the area apparently remote from the sites of conflict. However, the film does poorly in representing the communities of the borderlands. The Podlasie region, located in northeastern Poland, has long been a crossroads of various cultures, ethnic groups, and religions. Its historical and socio-political context, particularly concerning local diversity and migration, has shaped its contemporary identity. Podlasie has historically been home to Poles, Belarusians, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, and Jews, alongside smaller communities of Russians, Tatars, and Armenians. The varied religious landscape includes Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox Christians, and a Tatar Muslim minority. This diversity created a unique cultural blend, but it was also a source of tension during periods of political crises. In the film, there is virtually no mention of the complicated ethnic, linguistic, and religious structure of the society of Podlasie, no allusions to its own rich and tragic history of migration, for example, the plight of the Bieżeńcy, the inhabitants of the area who were subject a mass evacuation into the depths of Russia during World War I (Barwiński). In the few scenes in which we see locals as minor protagonists, the attitude towards migrants is presented in terms of Derridean hostipitality.3 For example, in one of the initial scenes, a local farmer offers water and food to an Afghan woman emerging from the forest, but then reaches for his cellphone, apparently to inform the authorities about this encounter. Strangely enough, a rare element of local color is Jan’s father-in-law’s production of “bimber,” moonlight vodka, stereotypically associated with the region. These omissions of the specificity of the regional milieu may increase the understanding of migration as a global phenomenon, but otherwise the context of Poland is very pronounced, for example, in direct verbal and visual references to Polish politicians.
30As Alejandro G. Iñárritu does in Carne y Arena, Holland attempts to immerse the viewers in the narrative and put them in the position of participants. To offer a naturalistic view of the trauma of illegal border crossings and to emotionally engage viewers in the drama of the push-backs, Green Border uses traditional filming techniques, such as hand-held camera, the use of unusual angles, fast tracking, close-ups and extreme close-ups, short cuts, or limited use of lighting. The Polish film is very successful in evoking both the bodily and emotional experience of migrants crossing the Polish-Belarusian border.
31Holland’s movie shares one more feature with its American counterparts: by exploring the notion of the “border” through various characters and their relationships (marital, legal, social, linguistic, cultural, ethnic, racial), it brings to light numerous “uncomfortable” issues mentioned in the previous analysis. It offers a shocking picture of brutalization and violence as a way of dealing with the influx of migrants. There is the institutionalized violence of the Border Patrol, sanctioned by the authorities, but there are also individual acts of vicious, unnecessary, mindless, or sadistic violence by individuals encouraged by the system which dehumanizes migrants, defined as “Putin’s bullets” used in a hybrid war. The film shows how the ideoscape of the media and government propaganda shapes public perception of the refugees and justifies their cruel treatment. A cell phone is destroyed, a thermos flask damaged to cause injury when the owner drinks from it, an activist is subjected to a humiliating body search. The representation of the border is constructed, similarly to Tommy Lee Jones’ film, through the subject of death, death away from home, the motif of the burial/disposal of dead bodies, and the question of redemption. This is one of the most significant ways in which the gravity and the global significance of mass migrations is brought to the viewers’ attention.
32While exhibiting many typical tropes, visual conventions and narrative motifs of the American film, Green Border departs from the Hollywood models, first of all by strongly focusing on the moral dilemmas of border activism. Jan is torn between his sense of professional duty and loyalty to fellow border guards, and his own moral scruples. Julia decides to break the law to make the help to migrants effective. These are only two major storylines among many others, focusing on the moral dilemmas that the migrants themselves and the people involved in the processes of migration face. Moreover, Green Border examines the impact of global migrations on the imagined national community in a more profound way than its American counterparts do. The epilogue, pointing to the contrast between the treatment of refugees at the Belarusian border and the welcoming of Ukrainian war refugees, demonstrates a deeper issue within Polish national identity concerning its imagined borders and the question who is worthy of help.
33In generic terms, Green Border exhibits numerous features of action film, especially in the pushback scenes and in the dramatic sequences when Julia executes her plan of saving two young Africans stranded in the forest. Basically, however, the film is a psychological drama, focusing on the moral dilemmas that the characters go through and challenging viewers to reflect on the moral choices that fall to ordinary people every day. Thus, Holland found a reconstructed formula of the so-called Polish cinema of “moral anxiety” as represented by Krzysztof Zanussi and Krzysztof Kieślowski (see Haltof 73–145 for a general overview), as a convenient cinematic model to discuss the problem of global migration and its repercussions for borders and for life in borderlands. The attacks on the film and its director by the Polish conservative media and right-wing politicians serve to prove that Green Border, discursively engaging in the problem of migration from the perspective of individual moral responsibility, dramatically challenged the view of global migration as a threat to Western civilization.
34Agnieszka Holland’s Green Border is an outstanding and deeply moving film which succeeded in turning attention of the Polish public to the subject of global migration. Addressing the question of the present authors during a conversation at Canisius University in October 2024, Holland said that in the making of Green Border she had not been directly influenced by the American migration movies, stating she had no familiarity with the two U.S. works studied in this paper. Instead, she admitted being influenced by European documentary films about global migrations (“Conversation with Agnieszka Holland on Green Border”). However, the comparative analysis of The Three Burials, Flesh and Sand, and Green Border has identified resemblance and correspondence in both cinematic techniques and ethical concerns surrounding migration. All three works discussed in this paper share several visual and narrative elements, including the journey motif, the use of desaturated color or darkness, and a central focus on precarity, trauma, and fear. In all three films, the borderlands are represented as gray zones, oftentimes outside of any jurisdiction, with its own laws—or lawlessness. The Three Lives features scenes from the desert and the mountain trek which are characterized by desaturated colors, as if covering the borderlands by a film that spreads over this area transforming it into a separate space, the edge/the margin that is governed by its own laws. In Carne y Arena darkness prevails, aggravating anxiety and fear of the border crossing. The use of black-and white stock in Green Border helps to represent the Polish Belorussian borderlands as a space where the basic moral rules are suspended and the law is twisted to suit the political interests of the people in power.
35Despite different genres and technologies, all three films represent borders as fluid, contested, and deeply human sites. Whether desert or forest, the natural setting becomes a metaphor for abandonment and exposure. Migrants’ mobility is enforced by large-scale processes beyond their control, and their “imagined worlds” are impossible to reach. Instead, border crossers find themselves in precarious and traumatic spaces, deprived of basic agency. The three films are—in different ways—empathy-centered narratives, which rely on the motif of the white savior. But the actions of the white protagonists (or the project creators in the case of Carne y Arena) fail to restore agency to figures of the migrants in these stories. In narrating the global migration crisis, the works discussed here attempt, in varying ways, to immerse the viewer emotionally in the experience of migration. They expose state violence and discuss the moral ambiguity of the treatment of migrants, interrogate the politics of borders in the 21st century, and thus contest the frameworks of national identity. In these representations, the border becomes a site of revelation—about who we are, whom we consider the Other, and how we respond to the presence of the Other within national borders.
- 4 Ewa Antoszek uses this reference in her analysis of Reyna Grande’s text in “Contested Spaces/Striat (...)
36The present comparative study suggests that there are certain universal discourses of migration crisis, and similar narrative schemes and visual tropes used for interpretation of borders, which originated—arguably—in the interpretations of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. The U.S.-Mexico border functions like a matrix for other border encounters all over the world, and, as a result, the discourses on the U.S.-Mexico border form a framework to which artists easily reach and which they adopt to interpret other borderscapes. When subjected to comparative analysis, migration films show an increasingly global character of migration and its broadening scope, and the ways in which global mobility leads to the disruption and reconfiguration of local communities and institutions. The movies studied in this paper serve as gripping case studies of contemporary ethnoscapes in crisis. They show how the movements of people, especially those in precarious situations, challenge the concepts of national borders, moral frameworks, and the constructions of nations as “imagined communities.” The examples of the countries that have become buffer zones—Mexico to migrants from Central America, Poland to migrants from outside of the EU—manifest that “[t]here exists not a Border with capital B but unpredictable boundary encounters which show how the border repeats itself in different locations and times” (Benito and Manzanas 4) on a global scale.4