There are so many contentious borders in the news. You’ll hear one talked about in tonight’s U.S. presidential debate. Borders are necessary protectors of sovereignty, or barriers to better lives, or both. 

Today, Peter Rainer reviews “Green Border,” a scripted drama shot in documentary style. In black and white, it depicts life in 2021 along a forbidding, wooded exclusion zone on the border of Poland and Belarus. 

There is dark brutality in the film. But its director focuses more on morality, on choices, on the pull of humanity. “What she offers up, in the face of so much suffering,” Peter writes, “is a higher aspiration.”