Fresh Air - Actor David Oyelowo On 'Lawmen: Bass Reeves'

Episode Date: June 19, 2024

Oyelowo produced and stars in the Paramount+ series about Bass, a formerly enslaved man who went on to become one of the nation's first Black Deputy U.S. Marshals. "We see many stories centering Black people, from a historical context, about how we've been brutalized, how we've been marginalized," Oyelowo says. "But very rarely, in my opinion, do you see those triumphant stories where we overcome."Plus, John Powers reviews Green Border.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. Today marks Juneteenth, the day in 1865 when slavery ended in Texas, two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect. One of the Lone Star State's folklore heroes of that time period is Bass Reeves, a formerly enslaved man who went on to become one of the nation's first black deputy U.S. Marshals. His story is the stuff of legend. They say Bass Reeves spoke five tribal languages and is credited with bringing thousands of outlaws to justice. It's a story actor David Oyelowo was obsessed with from the moment he read it, but it would take him eight years to finally get a series about Reeves made. Lawman Bass Reeves debuted on Paramount Plus last fall. David both produced and starred in the series, which starts in a Civil War battle when an

enslaved Reeves is forced by his master to fight for the Confederacy. Reeves later flees to Indian territory, where he meets a U.S. marshal who notices Reeves' fluency in native languages and marksmanship. Reeves is later deputized and given the task of capturing criminals. But an internal battle rages within Reeves as he grapples with his own sense of morality and justice. In the season finale, Reeves goes off without official sanction to get revenge against a corrupt lawman, a Texas Ranger. While on the hunt in a distant Texas town, a small boy utters to Bass Reeves a meaningful message. You a lawman or an outlaw?

Today a bit of both, I reckon. My daddy said the one and the same. Your daddy a smart man? That was a scene from the Golden Globe-nominated series Lawmen, Bass Reeves. David Oyelowo is an Emmy and Golden Globe-nominated actor who rose to prominence for portraying Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Ava DuVernay's film Selma and Peter Snowden in the HBO film Nightingale. He starred in several films and television shows, including the Netflix film The Midnight Sky alongside George Clooney. David Oyelowo, welcome back to Fresh Air.

Thanks for having me. Always good to be here. It seems to take years for many of your projects to come to fruition. Eight years is a long time. Yeah, I wish it wasn't this way. But for whatever reason, I seem designed to be the guy who sticks it out. You stuck it out because you were passionate about this story. You felt like this story was important. What was it that made you feel that way? What was it that you connected with this character, with this person, Bass Reeves? I had grown up like a lot of kids of my generation, loving Westerns. They were on the TV ad nauseum. You know, Mom's broom was my white stallion, and I would clip-clop around the living room with her being upset that I was jumping all over the sofa.

And I was a fan of the genre, so to speak. And I didn't even know that I was missing something in terms of the representation of black people in that genre. It wasn't until many years later, actually, as I was digging into my research for Bass Reeves that I came to find out that one in three cowboys was black. In fact, the word cowboy is a racial epithet. They were actually called cow punchers. But because of the sheer amount of black people who were cowboys, that's the phrase, the boy of it all is why it became cowboy. I did not know that. And you'd be excused for not knowing that because the representation of them in films that are Westerns or TV shows that are Westerns, graphic novels, whatever it may be, books, is just not commensurate with how present they were.

All of the characters that you seem to take on are men on a mission, peacemakers, those who are really important to the story of America, but in some instances, under-told stories. about how we've been brutalized, how we've been marginalized, how prejudice has browbeaten us. But very rarely, in my opinion, do you see those triumphant stories where we overcome, where we are triumphant in a way that anyone and everyone would deem that individual to be a hero despite the obstacles that they overcome. And to me, that's where there is a universal truth in relation to the character that makes them aspirational, that makes it so that regardless of your race or country or ethnicity, you go, that's someone I want to be like. And so the combination of an aspirational character that is the center of the narrative, I think is the difference. Let's talk a little bit about Bass Reeves. He escapes enslavement amid the Civil War.

And this series takes us through his career in law enforcement during that period of Reconstruction. You know, from the moment I heard this story, though, I just couldn't wrap my head around this black man during that time period arresting white men. What kind of man would you have to be or did you have to be to be Bass Reeves? Well, this is why it was so exciting to play him and to tell the story. The whiplash it must have engendered to, within a very short period of time, go from being enslaved, fighting on the side of the Confederacy, to now you are empowered as a purveyor of justice to not only uphold the law, but to arrest the very people, a lot of them disgruntled ex-soldiers who deem this new world to be untenable. And you are a constant representation of what they deem to be untenable. Dangerous. I mean, his life is on the line constantly. Absolutely. Because the job he's doing is inherently dangerous, but because he's a black man doing it as well, in a world where in very recent memory, he was chattel. He was to be owned and to be abused, used and abused as the so-called master saw fit. And so that in and of itself is an incredible character to present

at an incredible time. The Reconstruction era is where this is playing out beyond the Civil War and before Jim Crow, an extraordinary time to be a black person in America. You had to recreate based on probably historical documents, other people in order to make a composite of Bass Reefs, because really there's not much there about him. You had to spend a lot of time researching. Yeah. You know, as you do your research, you start to see the stories that come up again and again and feel more plausible. And actually there are court transcripts of some of the cases that he had to give testimony for in terms of people that he arrested. You know, he did beat his enslaver almost to death.

He did live with Native Americans for a time. He was a failed farmer. He was deputized by Judge Isaac Parker, as played by Donald Sutherland in our show. So there are many things you can tether to in terms of the poles of reality around which you now have to sort of build, like you say, on the basis of research, on the basis of what was going on at the time, and, you know, the joy of storytelling, dramatizing the life. Yeah. I mean, was there a detail that just really stuck with you, a legend or a story about him that you're like, oh my gosh, one thing, he was a

wonderful marksman, like he could really handle a gun, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, he was extraordinary at several things. I think one of the things that was true, and we exhibit to a certain extent in the show is that he was illiterate. He was denied the ability to read. Incredibly bright. There is a difference between being illiterate and being whip smart. He was whip smart. And what he would do, his wife, Jenny Reeves, could read. And when he would get the information, the written down information of the people that he had to go

and arrest, he would have her read them to him once, maybe twice, and he would memorize every single aspect of it in order to go and arrest that person. So he had an unbelievable mind and was often the smartest guy in the room. But he was a man of few words, which is another thing you see in our show. I got to talk about it. Yeah. Because I mean, in Westerns in general, you know, there's not a lot of dialogue. But in this one in particular, there's a lot of acting, a lot of your acting is just in your face. It's in your expressions. Where did you have to go to in your mind during these really powerful scenes where you're contemplating, you're thinking through the next action for your character for Bass Reeves? Well, to be enslaved at that time, there was a lot of politics around just where you place your eyes.

You were not allowed to look your enslaver in the eye. And so a lot of communication that was going on from a hierarchical point of view was nonverbal at that time because speaking to your enslaver was a dangerous thing to do. Espousing your opinions was a dangerous thing to do. Espousing your opinions was a dangerous thing to do. And so the disposition for survival was one of silent obedience, so to speak. And so that's woven into what black people were having to endure at that time. But you combine that with the fact that he is, one of the reasons why he's so good at being a deputy U.S. marshal is his ability to observe. And he did speak a myriad of languages.

You know, I had to speak Greek and Choctaw in the show. You had to, right, you had to learn those. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, so speaking was something he was good at, but he was even better at observation. And that's what made him incredible at what he did. There is this overriding theme where Bass Reeves is really asking himself, am I an instrument for justice or am I being used? And that's an interesting question that never really gets answered. I don't know if it could really be answered.

It's also really powerful because as a black person, anyone who has had been in a position of power has probably asked themselves that question too. What about you? Well, I think in the show, that's one of the primary themes of the show. And it's rooted in the gray area that is the notion of justice. How do we talk about justice in America at a time where there have been centuries of injustice meted out towards African Americans who were stolen from their continent to build America? So when you are a black person who has been living in what can only be described as an unjust world, and you are now being invited into an infrastructure that is saying that it has had a change of heart, a change of mind. And so therefore, you're now being invited into a world where and you can see that there are black people who are going into politics, black people who are going into industry and entrepreneurship and law enforcement.

So it is suddenly a new world, but it is someone who looks like your enslaver who is inviting you to do that. That's a very confusing thing. You are now arresting people who are going to toss racial epithets at you saying you are not the thing that your badge says you are. That is something I don't accept. And the reality is all of those mistrusts you feel about this changed society soon get answered with Jim Crow. There's so many quiet moments. And as I mentioned, you act so much with your face and your body and the action within scenes. But your character, there are moments where we hear Bass speak, and it's a very distinct accent. And I want to play a scene between you as Bass Reeves and the local judge who has appointed Reeves a scene between U.S. Bass Reeves and the local judge who was appointed

Reeves to be a U.S. Marshal. And in this scene, the judge played by Donald Sutherland tells Reeves a story from his childhood, how when he was a boy, he showed his father what he thought was gold, and his father said, that's not gold, it's pyrite, it's fool's gold. And so then he asked Bass, a man that he's always trusted, whether he himself is gold or pyrite. It's fool's gold. And so then he asked Bass, a man that he's always trusted, whether he himself is gold or pyrite. Let's listen. The man whose name and brand I carry, the one who taught me to ride, to shoot, was William Reeves. Everyone told me how fortunate I was to have his good favor. He got the big man's interest, bass.

Mind him good, bass. He wasn't a cruel man, at least not on the surface. But then he gifted me to his son, George. And when that man's cruel came too much to bear, I didn't go treasure hunting, collecting loose rocks, fool's gold. No, son.

For you, knowing who's who, a simple thing, gold or pyrite, but justice ain't nothing more costly. That was my guest today, David Oyelowo, starring as Bass Reeves in the Paramount Plus series. David, this accent is very distinct. What did you find out about how Black Americans spoke during that particular time period in that region? And there is a music in the way they spoke that I recognize because I'm of Nigerian descent myself and lived there for a fair few years. And that was the accent my parents had. And people didn't move around as much back then.

So the accents people had were more distinctive and more traceable to West Africa. And we found this because we heard recordings that were later than the 1860s, which is when our show is set. You can hear the sounds. And it's extraordinary to me how akin to the Yoruba sounds that I grew up listening to. There's sort of a melodic quality. And so the combination of that, the transcripts that we were looking at,

the fact that we cover 15 years of his life, the fact that he lived a very hard life, the failed farmer for about 10 years, all that dust, all that outdoors life, all that time on a horse, people grew older a lot quicker back then. And a lot of the places that would manifest is in the voice. What did you do to get yourself there? Well, because it's more than an accent is what you're telling me. Yes, yes. You know, often, young

people who want to be actors, ask me what the trajectory it is I would recommend to them in terms of becoming a good actor. I will always say it's the theater. And I... Your early career was in the theater. It was in the theater. And when you're doing plays, you don't have the luxury of editing and VFX and all the amazing things that cinema and television gives you as a tool, as an actor, in order to convey a character. Your body is the tool, your voice, your disposition, and you're having to transmit that to sometimes hundreds of people, sometimes thousands of people, and the voice is a primary way you are expressing who and what the character is. And so I had several opportunities at that

early in my career. So I know the power of the placement of the voice, not just the accent itself. And so, you know, in order to convey a weariness that is inevitable with that life and with the culture and the history and the politics of that time, you know, I am an actor who aspires Dr. King had a very specific way his neck sat within his collars. So I asked Ruth, our costume designer, to make all of my collars about half an inch smaller. So it's a little tight. So it's a little tight. And that in and of itself, that constriction then did something to my body. It brought a sort of a tenseness to everything that I couldn't have done if I was more comfortable in what I was wearing. And that's the genius of Ruth Carter.

That was something that we arrived at together. So there are so many things that come to bear as you are trying to convey the truth of a character. The voice is just another one of those tools. You had to learn how to ride horses and shoot a gun. Yeah, I did that for over a year. Just outside LA here, I would get on a horse with amazing trainers, and we would ride in very tricky terrain in order for me to get to a place of ease that when cameras are rolling,

when I had to gallop, when I had to suddenly stop, when I'm in all this undulating, inclement circumstances. I remember seeing Kevin Costner in Dances with Wolves. And there's a scene early on in the film where he rides across a battlefield in a sort of death defying way. And he lets go of the reins and he is riding this horse without holding onto the reins. He throws his arms to the side, looks up to the high heavens with his eyes closed. And it was clearly him. And I just thought, whoa, you got to get to that level. You've got to get to that level because that's the to get to that level, because that's the point at which he buys the audience's trust in the fact that he is that

character. That is not a stunt guy. You are watching someone not unlike any of Daniel Day Lewis's performances, or you watch Denzel Washington and Malcolm X. You feel that an actor has given themselves over to a character and that allows you to relax and be completely tethered to the truth of what that actor is doing. Our guest today is David Oyelowo, star and executive producer of the Paramount Plus series Lawmen, Bass Reeves. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies.

Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. Hey there, Anne-Marie Baldonado here with a preview of our latest Fresh Air Plus bonus episode. It's terribly romantic in a sleazy kind of a way.

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we listen back to Terry's interview with the divine Miss M herself, Bette Midler. Tune in and join Fresh Air Plus for yourself at plus.nbr.org. The show Lawmen, Bass Reeves, this show has been praised. There's also been criticism that it's not Western enough, that the narrative, the family narrative may take over more than the Western part of it. Maybe people, when they saw that this was coming out, thought, okay, I'm going to come and see what I've always seen. How do you respond to that?

It was absolutely by design. And I love hearing that because for me, when I first sat down with Chad Feehan, our creator and showrunner, I wanted to make a Western for people who don't love Westerns. And Westerns, typically the tropes are revenge. The tropes are a lone man who has no ties to any family. And the violence often, in my opinion, is mindless. This man has a family. Love is the driver for why he consistently wants to get back to his family. Revenge is not the driver for why he wants to be a purveyor of justice. His faith in God and the Bible is. And so there are so many things inherent in the

character that fly in the face of the tropes of the Western. But also, with this being one of the rare times where a show of this nature is centering a black person, centering a black family, I personally was not interested in it being what we have seen before. I love shows and films that are fresh and familiar. Give me my Western in a fresh way. And that is what we set out to do. You mentioned that you're Nigerian. You grew up in the UK and in Nigeria. You came to this country.

And I wonder how your perception and understanding of the black American has changed or evolved since you've been here and you've been taking on these roles. Yeah, it's been quite the ride and one that I didn't seek out. But yes, between films like Red Tails playing a Tuskegee airman or The Butler playing the son of The admit I didn't before, is just how extraordinary black people in America are. challenge, how much pain, how much, how many lies have also been told about the reality of who and what black people are to this country. Black people built this country. There is no America without the stealing of all of those black bodies to basically build this nation. There just isn't. And for all of that injustice to be foisted upon a people and then to still be invested in building the country, building community, taking ownership of being American is truly extraordinary to me. What were your perceptions when you were a kid growing up of black people in America?

Because so many of the narratives are negative, you just think, well, black people in America are inherently upset with how they've been treated and they are stuck in that place. That's the perception you have growing up in the UK. You watch Do the Right Thing and I love that film, but you can feel that there is a heat around what it is, particularly being an African-American man. You have been objectified. You have been consistently and continually accused of things you didn't do. You are mistrusted, but you are also exploited when it comes to sport and music and your body. And,

you know, there are so many pervasive narratives, particularly around black men. And when you are imbibing culture from across the pond, and you're getting these negative stereotypes shoved down your neck, what you're not having as much of a front row seat to is just how much of what is good about America was built on the back of black people. Just how much of what America is able to call itself is rooted in a forgiveness and a love love which you could argue isn't warranted from black people. I've always wondered about, you know, it seems that for the United States, our number one export is like black entertainment and culture too. Like it's, it drives and it

informs so much. So when you were a young person in the UK and in Nigeria, and so much of what you were taking in was that, I mean, did you have an understanding or depth of just how much contribution black people paid in that regard to the arts? Because of how inherently, and I genuinely mean this, black people are and i and i say this as someone who grew up in an african country from the age of 6 to 13 and the way nigerians move through the the world is transcendent um i did grow up listening to that music and watching those films sydney poitier was my hero because he was my mom's favorite actor. He had a poise and a disposition that was very akin to what I saw in my uncles and my own father, despite the challenges that they might face.

And of course, yes, there's the music, there's the fashion, there's the literature, there's all this amazing stuff. But it is all being pushed through a white lens. It is all being shown through white distribution mechanisms. And, you know, some of these films are being directed by people who are not of the demographic that are centered within the show itself. So I saw this very, very clearly in my time in the development phase of Selma, for instance. And it was illustrative of the point I'm trying to make, which is when I first happened upon that script in 2007, the director was a white man and the film centered Lyndon Johnson, not Dr. King. Lyndon Johnson was the lead and Dr. King was tangential. That script then went to another white male director.

The narrative remained the same. It then went to a black director. It went to Spike Lee. I wasn't a part of the project at that point, but I was by the time it became Lee Daniels. And suddenly, Dr. King was the center of the movement became centered in a way that you could have actresses like Oprah Winfrey and Lorraine Toussaint and Carmen Ejogo and Tessa Thompson and Niecy Nash in prominent enough ways that you are getting not just the man that is Dr. King, but the movement and how it was driven not just by other black men, but by black women as well. Let's take a short break. If you're just

joining us, my guest today is David Oyelowo, star and executive producer of the Paramount Plus series Lawmen, Bass Reeves. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is Fresh Air. Your mother had a prophecy when you were a kid, when you were born. She said that you would walk amongst kings. Yeah. When did you first learn about that prophecy? confused by it because I didn't entirely know what it meant. I mean, you could watch films and see the Knights of the Round Table or whatever and think, oh, that's a world in which kings were

roaming the earth and you could mingle with them. But I didn't see anything growing up on a council estate in Islington that suggested I wouldn't be anywhere near kings. That's a working class. Yeah, it's like growing up in the projects. And so I loved that my mom considered that as something in my future, but I couldn't see it for myself. As you got older, how did you interpret that as you went through different stages in life, that prophecy and what it meant for you?

How do you sit with it today when you reflect on it? Well, it's funny. One of the reasons I'm an actor today is because the Prince's Trust sponsored me to be able to join a youth theater, which is where I actually met my wife, Jessica, when we were teenagers. And that was the now King Charles, it was the Prince's Trust. And King Charles is now a friend of mine. You know, and because I've been an ambassador for his trust for, I mean, 25 years now. My seminal role in the theater was playing the King of England in Henry VI, parts one, two, and three, in a film called The United Kingdom. I played the King of Botswana, who was exiled because he married a white lady.

So, you know, it's definitely been a theme. I am of royal descent. My father's dad was the king of a part of Nigeria called Awe. People hear that and immediately think, oh, wow, so you're this print and all that. Trust me, it's not all of the things that you associate with being the king of England. But, you know, that is also part of my familial history as well. So it has been a theme. And my interpretation of that is that it's probably why I'm drawn to playing aspirational characters, characters that for me personally as a black person make me proud to be black,

make me proud of my culture, my history, and what we have contributed to the world as a whole, which again, I feel isn't platformed as much as it should. You know, something interesting when I was reading some old articles about you, listening to some old interviews with you, Everyone's so fascinated by that history, that royal lineage from your Nigerian history. There's so much myth-making around it. Right. What were the realities of you growing up? Because you lived in Nigeria for a time, you lived in the UK, but you all were really middle class and in many instances working class.

Absolutely. Yeah, when we first moved to Nigeria, we lived on Oyelowo Street, on the Oyelowo compound, which is, you know, very snazzy. That had to feel cool, was it? Did it to you or did you take it for granted? Well, I was very young. I was six, seven years old. So it was a bit confusing, if I'm totally honest. But my father was one of six kids. And he was the youngest boy. And he really didn't want to be deemed to be someone who was reliant on his family name or his brothers who were in politics and doctors and they were

fairly affluent. He wanted to sort of do it his own way. And so he kind of broke away, not from the family, but from anything that could be considered him sponging of his own family. And so we were actually quite poor growing up. And my father had made the choice that he wanted to go it alone. And that was why he moved to the UK in the first place. That's why even when we were in Nigeria, not long after we moved there, we were no longer living on the Oyelowo compound. We were living in a tiny apartment with my dad working for the Nigerian Airways. What do you think it was that he wanted to make a name for himself or do it himself? There is a pride and a disposition that I attribute to Nigerians in a way that I probably shouldn't generalize, but it's the pride of being self-made. It's the pride of being

self-reliant. It's the pride of standing on your own two feet. And my dad had that in spades. He is where I learned my work ethic. He is where I learned my love for family. He was a doer, not a talker. And he worked harder than anyone I have ever seen anywhere, ever. And it's why, you know, again, when young actors say to me, what would be your advice as to how to succeed? I would say, well, the thing that has stood me in good stead is when you're asleep, I'm working. Something you mentioned, I've heard you talk about in growing up in Nigeria was the sense of self. You didn't suffer from minority mentality. Is that the term that you use? Right. So by the time you got to the UK, went back to the UK, you had a deep sense of self because, you know, you're just around all people who look like you in Nigeria. It's very similar to how I grew up in Detroit. Like everything was black. My church was black. My school was black. My neighborhood was black. So my sense of self was pretty strong by the time I went onto the greater world. Have you thought about that? How do you grapple with that? Yeah. There are so many things that are constructs that torpedo our sense of self. If you're constantly being told you're a minority, if you have the notion that you are constantly being reminded of your race in a negative way, these are things

that subconsciously work their way into how you think of yourself. If you are watching films and television shows where you are constantly the best friend, the black best friend, or the magical Negro, as we know that trope, or you're just constantly tangential, superfluous, or peripheral to the narrative. You are gathering data as to what your skin plus the world or that culture or community that you are within, how it feels about you, where it places you on the hierarchy of things. Now, if you grow up in a community like I did in Lagos, Nigeria, where every image, every bit of stimulus I am receiving is telling me I am central to the life of that community, that is also something that is your internalizing and affects your disposition as you go out into the world.

So the minority mentality is something I was able to discern when I moved back to the UK at age 13, being in Nigeria from 6 to 13. And suddenly this notion of race, Race is a construct. It's a construct to help us rationalize, to be perfectly frank, some of the terrible things we have done to each other through history, as opposed to just feeling like a human being. When I get out of bed every morning, my first thought is not, I'm a black man. You know what I mean? I'm David. I'm a human being. I love my wife.

I love my kids. Are they okay? Let me go feed the dogs. Can I hit the gym? You know, these are the thoughts. But then very quickly, as I exit my door, there is stimulus hitting me that is deeming me anomalous, deeming me different, deeming me problematic at times or deeming me angry at the world or whatever it is. And sometimes that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Sometimes it's something you're fighting against. But both of those things are negative.

And I call it actually another phrase I use is the Sidney Poitier syndrome, when you look at what he achieved in this country at that time, something that if you were a black actor today, you know, winning the awards he did, having the acclaim he did, working with the directors he did, being number one on the call sheet at the time he was, even today, that's a challenge. How did he achieve that? It's because he grew up in the Caribbean, where again, he didn't have a minority mentality. So he was walking into rooms, circumstances and situations with a disposition that didn't have him in a boxer stance the whole time. He had an ease to the way he was confronting the world because he didn't feel like he was constantly at war with it.

David Oyelowo, thank you so much for this conversation. Thank you. My pleasure. This was fun. That was David Oyelowo, star and executive producer of the Paramount Plus series Lawmen, Bass Reeves. Coming up, critic-at-large John Powers reviews the new movie Green Border. This is Fresh Air. Green Border is the new movie by the veteran director Agnieszka Holland. It tells the story of a refugee family trying to escape to Western Europe and of the people who try to help and stop them.

The film, which opens this week, won the special jury prize at the Venice Film Festival and stirred controversy in Holland's native Poland. Our critic at large, John Power, says it's the strongest movie he's seen all year. Some topics are so distressing that it's easy to turn away and just not think about them. One is the world's seemingly endless refugee crisis. But when poor, often traumatized people cross into your country by the thousands, or tens of thousands, averting your eyes isn't enough. You have to do something. The complexity of doing anything lies at the heart of Green Border, a new movie that packs a real emotional wallop. It's the crowning achievement

of filmmaker Agnieszka Holland, the 75-year-old Polish emigre who's built a long, varied career telling political stories about everything from the Holocaust and Soviet tyranny to the drug war streets of Baltimore on the wire. Holland has always had a laser eye for moral conflicts, and here, exploring the refugee situation in Eastern Europe, she shows how every choice exacts some sort of price. We start in October 2021, with a Syrian family headed by a torture victim named Bashir flying into Belarus, where they expect to cross the greenly forested border into Poland and then claim asylum in Sweden. But once they slip through the razor wire into Poland, we made it, they exult. They discover they've actually entered a nightmare from which the supposedly enlightened EU won't rescue them.

Far from offering safe passage, the Polish authorities round them up and dump them back into thuggish Belarus, which then rounds them up and dumps them back into the Polish forest, over and over in a Kafkaesque cycle complete with beatings and robbery. Their story is powerful enough to carry a whole film, but Holland expands the canvas to include characters on the front lines of dealing with refugees from the Middle East and Africa. We follow a rookie border guard, Jan, a nice guy with a wife and baby on the way, who's been trained to think he's protecting the homeland from terrorists and sex offenders who are being funneled into Poland by Vladimir Putin. We follow a crew of activists who assist refugees in the countryside, offering them food, water, and medical attention. And

finally, we follow Yulia, a widowed therapist whose surprise encounter with an injured refugee starts her down a heroically risky path. Along the way, characters who we like die, or do unlikable things, or in some cases, disappear into a patrol car and never return. A few almost randomly make it out of Poland. For every generous soul like Laila, an Afghani English teacher who shares what she has with her fellow refugees, there's a racist border guard who charges desperately thirsty people 50 euros for a bottle of water, and then, after taking their money, pours it onto the ground before their eyes. Everyone is constantly making hard choices. For instance, the activists aid the refugees with food and medicine, which is allowed,

but they refuse to help them elude the border guards even when they can. Such intervention would get the group banned from aiding any further refugees and could get them imprisoned for years. Each member of the group has a personal line that defines what they're willing to do or not do, and the lines change. Although the film has a political kick, one of Holland's virtues is her sense of reality, her way of reminding us that even in extreme circumstances, ordinary life goes on. Refugee kids bicker like all other kids, even when the family's on the run. Yulia may risk her career to help a wounded man, but she still needs to make that daily call to her desperately ill mother.

And after Jan and the other border guards quit for the day, they drink hard to forget what they've been doing. When Green Border premiered at festivals last fall, Holland was attacked by the Polish government, then run by the nativist, ultra-conservative Law and Justice Party, which tended to treat any criticism of its policies as slander, if not treason. But their words weren't about Dekal Holland, who cut her teeth on communism, emigrated west to make films more freely, and knows her way around bullying governments. Indeed, she ends her movie with a crushing kicker set at the Ukrainian border in 2022,

an open-armed greeting that reveals the Polish government's selective treatment of refugees. You can feel the moral outrage pulsing beneath Green Border. Yet Holland is too shrewd a filmmaker to become preachy or sentimental. This is what's going on in your world, the film tells us. What do you want to do about it? John Powers reviewed the new movie Green Border. On tomorrow's show, Dionne von Furstenberg and filmmaker Charmaine Obey Chinoy. Chinoy directed a new Hulu documentary about Dionne von Furstenberg's life, how she became a fashion designer and created the wrap dress, and the influence of her mother, who survived the Holocaust. The documentary is called Dionne von Furstenberg, Woman in Charge.

I hope you can join us. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Amy Sallet, Phyllis Myers, Sam Brigger, Lauren Krenzel, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Teresa Madden, Thea Chaloner, Susan Yakundi, Joel Wolfram,

and Kayla Lattimore. Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. With Terry Gross, I'm Tanya Mosley. This message comes from Grammarly. Back-and-forth communication at work is costly. I'm Tanya Mosley.