Silent Trees 2024

The main character of the documentary is a 16-year-old Kurdish girl who, after the tragic death of her mother on the Polish-Belarusian border, has to become a mother to her 4 younger brothers.

Review

A documentary about harrowing loss and fleeting joy, Agnieszka Zwiefka‘s “Silent Trees” follows a grieving family of Kurdish refugees escaping legal limbo. With animated interludes that function as flashbacks, it captures the world through the bespectacled eyes of a soft-spoken 16-year-old, Runa, a girl forced to grow up far too quickly in a Polish refugee camp.

The film plays like a follow-up and companion piece to another recent Polish production detailing the same inhumane premise: Agnieszka Holland’s “Green Border,” a haunting dramatization of the “red zone” between the borders of Poland and Belarus, where numerous Middle Eastern migrants have been cruelly bounced back and forth between the two countries. Guerrilla cell-phone footage introduces us to the grim violence therein, laying the foundation for Runa’s coming-of-age story through dark,