Filmmaker Agnieszka Holland will be in town later this month for her latest film, the powerful Green Border. She’ll participate in Q&As after the evening screenings at the Royal on Friday and Saturday, June 28 and 29 and for good measure join us for a Q&A after the June 29 screening of her 1993 family film The Secret Garden, which we’re screening as part of our Anniversary Classics series. One moviegoer might want to ask her how she manages such range, because the movies are quite different.
Thirty years after her Oscar-nominated film Europa Europa, Holland’s poignant and essential Green Border is set in the treacherous and swampy forests that make up the so-called “green border” between Belarus and Poland. Here 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. In an attempt to provoke Europe, refugees are lured to the border by propaganda promising easy passage to the EU. Finding themselves pawns in this hidden war, the lives of Julia, a newly minted activist who has given up her comfortable life; Jan, a young border guard; and a Syrian family intertwine.
“A heart-in-mouth thriller… Agnieszka Holland‘s bruisingly powerful new refugee drama ultimately comes from a place of optimism.” – Jessica Kiang, Variety
“A righteous, infuriating and woefully compelling watch.” – Laura Bobiak, Observer
“Profoundly moving, flawlessly executed… if cinema is an empathy machine, to paraphrase the late Roger Ebert, then Agnieszka Holland‘s new film is one precision-tooled specimen.” – Leslie Felperin, The Hollywood Reporter
“A humanitarian masterpiece.” – Damon Wise, Deadline
The Secret Garden follows a young British girl born and reared in India who is returned to her uncle’s English castle after becoming an orphan. She begins exploring the estate and discovers a garden that has been locked and forgotten. Aided by one of the servants’ boys, she begins restoring the garden, and eventually discovers some other secrets of the manor. Writing in the New York Times, Janet Maslin began her review of The Secret Garden this way: “A fawn, a bunny, a lamb: these are among the last things anyone might expect to see in a film directed by Agnieszka Holland, whose other work (including Europa, Europa and Olivier, Olivier) had not a trace of sugarplums in its makeup. Yet Ms. Holland’s film of The Secret Garden is elegantly expressive, a discreet and lovely rendering of the children’s classic by Frances Hodgson Burnett. That book is a paean to the restorative powers of the natural world, and Ms. Holland succeeds in conveying much of its delicate beauty.”
