Thessaloniki Documentary Festival 2024: Forest (Las) | Review
Lidia Duda’s most recent documentary Forest delves into the refugee crisis on the Polish-Belarusian border, portraying the struggles of a couple endeavoring to establish a safe haven for their children.
For some individuals, the forest may pose dangers, but for Asia and Marek, living an isolated lifestyle is their aspiration. They view the forest as a haven where their children can grow up safely, shielded from the issues of today’s world. Upon completing their university studies, they purchased an old house in Białowieża Forest, on Poland’s eastern border with Belarus, to raise their children and relish an independent life on a small farm. For Franek, Ignacy, and Marysia, the forest became their second home. However, everything changed when significant political events encroached upon their sanctuary. The forest’s essence, where European bison and herds of roe deer often approach their windows, shifts when strangers and others arrive. Refugees, primarily from the Middle East—lost, hungry, and often sick—are transported by Belarus to the border with Poland. However, the Polish government responds by disseminating anti-migrant propaganda and repelling them. Unwelcome in both Poland and Belarus, the refugees seek refuge within the forest, disrupting this family’s paradise.
Forest, or Las in Polish, shares linguistic roots with this year’s Sundance Grand Jury Prize Documentary winner, the intimate and heartrending A New Kind of Wilderness, which portrays a Norwegian family pursuing their dream of living close to nature off the grid. However, in Lidia Duda’s narrative, the refugee crisis takes this off-grid tale down a dark path, revealing the wilderness’s harsh realities, which are difficult to witness and comprehend. The crisis, which began in 2021 and was explored last year by Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland in her Venice-winning Green Border, sparked massive controversy and a wave of vicious political attacks by the Polish government. Yet, whether it’s on the Polish-Belarusian border or any other refugee crisis worldwide—for instance, Haider Rashid’s Europa, on the Turkish-Bulgarian border, or In the Land of Brothers, about Afghan refugees in Iran—we have always confronted degrading, brutal treatment and tragic tales of survival. In this documentary, rather than dwelling on grand political narratives, Lidia Duda succeeds in providing a human perspective and exploring moral dilemmas in such situations, imbuing the documentary with a tender touch and ensuring its compellingly human essence.
With the narrative centered on how the family copes with this tragedy, Duda, who also directed the child-centric documentary Fledglings, places the children of this family at the heart of the storytelling to demonstrate how children’s emotions remain pure and untainted by political correctness, particularly since their mother was most affected by these changes. Despite the harsh reality that their dream was shattered by this crisis, they choose to aid these homeless individuals, fully aware that the human suffering in the forest will haunt and traumatize their children. While the ambition to address such issues is commendable, offering a searing account of the migrant crisis through the perspective of one family whose dreams were dashed is both bleak and humanistic.
A co-production between Poland and the Czech Republic, Forest premiered at the 26th Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival, competing for the Golden Alexander in its main International Competition. The film was produced by Patryk Sielecki, Michał Ostatkiewicz, and Aleksandra Ostatkiewicz for the Lumisenta Film Foundation, and co-produced by Michal Sikora (Lonely Production), Anna Bławut Mazurkiewicz (Studio Filmowe Rabarbar), and Lidia Duda. Berlin’s Rise and Shine World Sales have acquired distribution rights to the film.
