A 2019 movie adapted from a play, also by William Nicholson. Starring Love Actually star Bill Nighy.
The most memorable quote is the answer to: why did you do it?
"I think... I thought there were three unhappy people. And now there is only one."
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Watched on SBS Australia.
Green Border is a 2023 movie by Agnieszka Holland.
The mood reminds me of the 2013 Oscar winner Ida. The "green" is the reference to the forest on the border between Belarus and Poland. It fades from green to black and white in the first scene of the movie and stays black and white till the end. It is a soul crashing drama, but it is also a documentary. I remember that Belarusian border crisis. I think Green Border presents the people and the 2021 events quite objectively. The epilogue is from another refugee crisis, from the Ukrainian-Polish border in February 2022.
Unlike in some Hollywood productions, main actors have connections with the characters they play (ethnicity, language, life experience) and play convincingly. I watched it on Australian SBS and it is shown with characters speaking: Arabic, Russian, English, Polish, French, with English subtitles. Highly recommended.
If you like this move, you may also like Agnieszka Holland's 1990 movie Europe, Europe.
I watched this movie on Australian SBS, where it was described as a historical drama. It feels more like an artistic documentary. The zone of interest was a restricted area around Auschwitz concentration camp during WW2. The film shows the life of the camp commander and his family. The camp is behind the fence and what is going on there can be heard and sometimes smelled. A lot of the story is suggested in the movie, not shown explicitly. The constant background noises from the camp are sometimes barely noticeable, sometimes loud. The haunting atmosphere of the movie reminds me a bit of Picnic at the Hanging Rock. There is no Hollywood ending in this film. Highly recommended to watch on a quiet lazy day.
I noticed one possible inaccuracy in the film. When there is a meeting of camp commanders and the names of the camps are listed, one is given as Majdanek. As far as I know, that was not the name Germans used officially. Majdanek is the Polish name of the area. The official camp name was KL Lublin. Majdanek is at least pronounceable for German-speakers, another camp name, commonly used in literature after the war is Chełmno - this one is unpronounceable. The German name was Kulmhof. Another well known example is Łódź Ghetto - Łódź, like Oświęcim and Chełmno, was incorporated into Germany in 1939 and was called Litzmannstadt.
