Venice Film Festival ends

On the evening of September 9, the Venice Festival will announce the winners. Critics predict the greatest success for Yorgos Lanthimos’ film “The Unfortunate Poor.” Two more competition films have been added to the candidates for prizes, united by one theme: Europe before the phenomenon of mass immigration. He talks about them Andrey Plakhov.

The first film was directed by the award-winning Polish woman Agnieszka Holland and is called “Green Border”. It is based on the events of the humanitarian crisis of 2021 on the Belarusian-Polish border, where thousands of migrants from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan arrived through Minsk and accumulated in the transit zone with the intention of entering the European Union at any cost. These people are fleeing wars, poverty and persecution, but they find themselves in a situation no better – although there is neither ISIS nor the Taliban here (both movements are banned on the territory of the Russian Federation). The most terrible things happen between two barriers, in no man’s land, where no one needs people who have become bargaining chips in political games, drowning in swamps, dying from hunger, dehydration and injuries.

The film gives three perspectives on these events. We see them through the eyes of the refugees themselves – a Syrian family with children and an Afghan teacher who go through all the circles of hell. A young Polish border guard presents a different view; he, like his colleagues, is being prepared to welcome “guests from the East” with racist instructions, and is encouraged to see refugees as “animals” rather than people. Many residents of the neighboring Polish village also experience fear of aliens and hostility towards them. At the same time, we meet a group of volunteers who illegally seek out abandoned refugees in the border forests and save them from death.

The center of the story is Julia, who lives alone in these places – a woman with a high degree of empathy, who joins the forest “activists”. We also see the thrashing of the border guard, overwhelmed by the pangs of conscience. As soon as it appeared, Holland’s sharp political film was sharply criticized by right-wing forces in Poland. Justice Minister Zbigniew Žebro compared it to Nazi propaganda, which portrayed Poles as bandits and murderers. In fact, Holland, a student of Andrzej Wajda, continues the humanistic line of her work. At one time, her film “Europe, Europe” – about a Jewish teenager, a hostage of the world war and totalitarian regimes – was nominated for an Oscar. In the new film, the director shows the reality of today’s Europe, which is again becoming an arena of populism and xenophobia. Shot with a moving camera in monochrome, Green Border fits into the line of important films of the “Polish school”, rich in ideas and emotions.

The second film nominated for prizes, “I Am Captain,” was directed by Italian Matteo Garrone. This is the semi-fairytale odyssey of Seydoux, a sixteen-year-old boy from Senegal, and his cousin Moussa to Italy – through the Sahara Desert, the notorious Libyan prisons and the raging elements of the Mediterranean Sea. Seydoux’s life was not so bad in his native Dakar: the film shows that often African youth flock to Europe not because of a terrible life, but seduced by available sources of information. It’s reminiscent of classic stories about teenagers running away from home, only adjusted for the era of YouTube and mobile phones.

A frivolous adventure with a taste of youthful romance turns into a fateful test. The peak is the final episode, in which the young hero, who cannot even swim, must navigate a rusty seaworthy vessel across the sea, filled to overflowing with unfortunate migrants – the sick, the elderly and women on the verge of giving birth. Garrone is a very experienced director; he knows how to limit himself both in showing the horrors of migrant wanderings and in whipping up sentimental feelings. Oddly enough, for artistic balance he uses a decorative aesthetic, sometimes even with a touch of glamor and mannerism, which is quite risky. But in the end, this plays into the film’s hands: the designer frames provide the necessary defamiliarizing effect, preventing it from getting bogged down in either naturalism or sweetness.

Unlike Green Border, I Am Captain concentrates only on the African part of the journey and ends with the appearance of an Italian border police helicopter over the sea. One can only guess what awaits the new newcomers in Europe. The main thing that Garrone managed to do was to awaken sympathy for the black hero and make him empathize with him. Seydoux Sarr, who played him, is an obvious candidate for the Marcello Mastroianni Prize, which is awarded in Venice to gifted young performers. The film also has a chance of winning more significant awards.