Jalal Altawil, far right, and Talia Ajjan in “Green Border.” (Agata Kubis/Kino Lorber/TNS)

Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland’s award-winning film “Green Border,” premiering Friday at the Coolidge Corner Theater, offers a wide-ranging and revealing look at the immigrant crisis as it erupted along Poland’s border with Belarus, an ally of Russia.

The two-time Oscar-nominated filmmaker uses black and white to explore the various elements that interact for refugees, with life-and-death consequences in the so-called exclusion zone where these supplicants are pawns.

Holland divides the film into chapters, beginning with “October 2021 Europe” and opening on a plane. We follow a determined single Afghan woman making the journey alone, a multi-generational Syrian family with a grandfather and three children. Later, we meet a border guard sickened by the brutality and death he witnesses as his pregnant wife waits to give birth. And there’s a local Polish woman who is driven to activism to help these unfortunate refugees from the Middle East and Africa. She is arrested, stripped naked, and photographed as a criminal for her efforts.

“I decided to make the film months after the crisis of the Polish borders began,” Holland, 75, said in a telephone interview in English. “And it became clear to me where it was going. At the same time, the Polish government decided to close the zone around the border and not allow the media access — and also nongovernmental organizations, medical organizations, and activists.

“So it was practically impossible to honestly document what was happening with a documentary film. I started thinking that this is the moment to make fiction, something that resembles reality and shows something that is happening.

“But we recreate the situations and try to make the people who are part of that situation whole, to give them a voice and a face and the space that we can use to understand what choices they face. Or when they have no choice at all.”

Because “Green Border” is an independent production, Holland said there were no barriers to making it black and white.

It was a choice because, she said, “I wanted the association with a documentary — and also with history. With the films of World War II.

“In that situation at the border, it became very relevant for many people. They said to me, ‘Oh, it’s just like the Holocaust,’ or ‘It was exactly what my grandmother told me.’

“And also, some of the images came back. And some of the habits of the uniform. A guy is a nice guy up until now and then they scream and, yeah, throw the kid over the barbed wire. So yeah, I wanted the documentary rawness and the metaphorical at the same time.”

“Green Border” premieres Friday at the Coolidge Theater