The Guest

A decade ago, Zvika Gregory Portnoy and Zuzanna Solakiewicz teamed up to make 15 Corners of the World, a documentary covering Polish composer Eugeniusz Rudnik’s vision of music. That was Solakiewicz’s debut. The pair have worked together since, and have now landed at IDFA with The Guest, a film set on the border between Poland and Belarus.

In 2021, that area became a source of consternation for organisations invested in human rights because both countries were turning back refugees, leaving them in migratory limbo. A year later, Lydia Gall of Human Rights Watch had tough words for Poland, a country unsurprisingly considered as the less belligerent of the bordering countries. “It’s unacceptable that an EU country is forcing people, many fleeing war and oppression, back into what can only be described as hellish conditions in Belarus,” she said.

Solakiewicz and Portnoy take us into the fear and (often literal) trembling at the heart of the zone through the experiences of Maciek, a Polish man living with his family on the Poland side of the border, and Alhyder, a Syrian refugee who comes to live with Maciek, following the likely buffeting from authorities on both sides of the border.

Naturally, there is some danger involved. There’s also some skepticism: a member of Maciek’s family wonders if the newcomer has come with a bomb? Maybe he’ll blow up the household that has shown him kindness? The biggest question, though, is not quite as explosive: What happens after Alhyder attains some sort of mental and physical stability? Where does he go to from here?

The documentary’s directors don’t appear too concerned with those questions. As it was with 15 Corners of the World, their work here is largely one of intimacy. Faces fill the screen and a lot of the action is confined to the house inhabited by the host and his guest. This is the kind of documentary where its behind the scenes decision-making might prove to be just as engaging as the documentary itself, if not more.

To ramp up the tension that is inbuilt for a story featuring a siege of sorts—soldiers are around the Maciek’s apartment—some parts of The Guest deploy a sound design that wouldn’t feel out of place in a thriller. But the action is pretty much limited to a lot of talk between the men at the centre of the tale, both of whom speak different languages, broken English being their common tongue. What makes it clear that the stakes here are higher than your average domestic drama is the kind of conversations and over-the-phone negotiations one imagines regular people don’t have. Take, for example, a scene where the economics of smuggling humans across the border is broached. We learn that the smuggler will not go on what must be a tricky journey if his cargo is a single person. To make the trip make sense, he will need to ferry four people across.

All of this adds up to make The Guest a sobering tale of the high stakes of war even for those not directly involved in combat. One imagines that fleeing Syria might have brought relief to the refugee but Poland’s refusal to grant access and the subsequent pushback to Belarus must be retraumatising. What Solakiewicz and Portnoy have done is to locate the grace and gratitude that is still possible in a circumstance as tragic as war. It is good advertisement for humanity. But it is also a recipe for unavoidable staidness. This, after all, is a film that goes into the woods when it is not within an apartment holding only a handful of ordinary people, none of whom are particularly charismatic characters—not that charisma is the one thing required during a war.

There is, however, a few notes of lightness. One comes after Alhyder, whose face transmits gratitude alloyed with awkwardness, gets a haircut as a disguise. “New man!” Maciek calls out. “Maybe Italiano, maybe Spain.” And just before the film closes, Alhyder expresses his worry about his host, which Maciek dismisses. In sweet broken English, the guest queries his host’s seeming recklessness, “I am inside problem. You outside problem. Why you go inside problem?”

It is a rare moment of candour in the film, which, without Al Jazeera as co-producers, might have limited appeal outside of very European festivals and a very small audience. But Portnoy and Solakiewicz probably knew that already.