Thanks to Agnieszka Holland’s “Green Border” we can now get a terrific glimpse of the suffering of asylum seekers who were used as political pawns by Belarus and Poland. Since it would have been impossible to film the movie in Belarus or Poland, Holland created a movie with actors to debict these people’s suffering.
Writes the Guardian: “Green Border, a feature film by the celebrated director Agnieszka Holland, won the special jury prize in Venice last month. It tells the story of a Syrian family trying to get to Europe via the Belarus-Poland border in 2021, and the brutal treatment they receive at the hands of Polish border guards.”
The movie also exposes the hypocrisy and racism of Europe towards such people.
“The end of the film makes the explicit comparison between the two refugee crises,” the daily continued, “and the different receptions granted to Ukrainians and to the much smaller number of darker-skinned refugees from Africa and the Middle East received at the border.”
In Finland, Perussuomalaiset* Interior Minister Mari Rantanen announced a tightening of asylum procedures in Finland by speeding up the process to four weeks. The asylum seeker will wait for the decision at the border.
Fearing that Russia may weaponize asylum seekers as was the case with Belarus, Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia in the fall of 2021, the Finnish Border Guard Act was given the green light by parliament in the summer of 2021 to build a fence at eight border crossing points with Russia. The fence, which will cost hundreds of millions of euros and take three to four years to build, will account for only 10%-20% of Finland’s 1,344-kilometre border, which is the longest border with Russia in the EU.
We’ll asylum seekers fleeing war and strife suffer the same fate as those that tried to cross into Poland?
Europe needs more than ever film directors like Holland to expose the grave injustice against asylum seekers coming from outside Europe.
Max Gustafson’s cartoon of Sweden ten years from now under the leadership of the far-right Sweden Democrats. Does the cartoon apply to Finland?
