Taking on the Polish-Belarusian border conflict from a different perspective, Wojciech Węglarz’s short documentary Bloodline is a meditative exploration of the human crisis through the eyes of a bison.
In the documentary films Forest and The Guest, which examine the Polish-Belarusian border conflict, the bison plays a pivotal role in the narrative. The European bison (Bison bonasus), also known as the wisent, is one of only two remaining species of bison in the world. These majestic animals can be found in the Białowieża Forest, the oldest forest in Europe, located on the current Poland-Belarus border—a region where a humanitarian crisis has been unfolding for the past four years.
The once-green border is now marked by a towering fence, a drastic change that has disrupted the natural ecosystem. In Bloodline, Węglarz doesn’t focus on refugees or those who help them. Instead, he uses the wisent to tell this story.
On a snowy night, a lone wisent stands, lost on one side of the fence, watching the rest of the herd on the other. But how could it cross when the barrier is so high? In another scene, the wisent sees a deer, similarly abandoned by its herd, being mauled by wolves. While these scenes may feel like something from a BBC Earth documentary, Węglarz’s sensitivity toward the animals is both intelligent and deeply empathetic. He frames the wisent’s plight as that of a lost refugee, using it to highlight the brutal reality of the ongoing humanitarian crisis. Bloodline is a sharp-eyed film that is fundamentally humanistic and weaves a portrait of the complexities of the problem for everything involved in the unmerciful landscape.
By focusing on the wisent’s eyes in a close-up shot, Węglarz evokes an expression of anger and anxiety. The strong emotions that move our protagonist are also reflected in the editing by Zuzanna Zuza Grabowska. Frame by frame, the story is crafted to make us believe that the emotions of the wisent—conveyed through different angles of the animal’s head—express a sense of disturbance, reflecting how profoundly the crisis has affected both the forest and its inhabitants. But is the wisent’s emotion in response to the humanitarian crisis happening in its territory truly real? Bloodline is a film that demonstrates sensitivity to something often overlooked: the brutal political system at the Poland-Belarus border not only violates human rights but also causes serious impacts on other, often unseen, victims.
Bloodline premiered in the IDFA Competition for Short Documentary and was produced by Jerzy Kapuściński, Ewa Jastrzębska, and Magdalena Tomanek for Munk Studio. It was co-financed by the Polish Film Institute.
