“Within the Rearview,” about filmmaker Maciek Hamela’s efforts to rescue civilians stranded by battle, is a shifting testimony to the destiny of the thousands and thousands of Ukrainians displaced by the Russian invasion. Because the award-winning documentary opens in French cinemas on Wednesday, the Polish director hopes it’s going to remind viewers of what’s at stake in Ukraine – and the struggling of refugees from all of the battle.
When Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine in February 2022, triggering a mass exodus of refugees, Warsaw-based filmmaker Maciek Hamela rushed to the border together with hundreds of fellow Poles to supply no matter help he may. Inside days, he drove a van throughout Ukraine, rounding up civilians stranded by the battle and taking them to security.
Hamela quickly realized that the intimacy the van supplied supplied a backdrop for shifting testimonies of the human toll of battle, and started filming the exchanges. The result’s a gripping, no-nonsense portrait of human displacement, filmed over six months and tens of hundreds of kilometers in a rustic devastated by battle.
Because the movie’s title suggests, the digicam on board Hamela focuses on the passengers behind the eight-seat van, capturing their misery as they drive away from the combating, forsaking their sons, husbands and houses. Some passengers sit quietly, shocked. Others inform tales of destruction, torture and loss of life. There are additionally light-hearted moments the place they confide in share their hopes and ambitions for the day the battle ends.
“The ocean! We are going to come again right here when the battle is over, proper Mother?” a little bit lady shouts as she marvels on the mighty Dnieper River, mistaking it for the ocean. “Completely, I promise,” solutions the drained one mom.
At one level, Hamela’s van turns right into a makeshift ambulance to evacuate a Congolese lady with life-threatening accidents. Fellow vacationers embrace a surrogate mom pregnant with a Westerner’s baby; an aged farmer whose eyes widen as he talks concerning the beloved cow she left behind; and a little bit lady so shocked she will be able to not communicate. One other baby performs a sport of rock-paper-scissors, however replaces the latter with a gun to make sure she wins – ensuing within the movie’s French title: “Stone, blade, gun”.
Typically the digicam pans out to disclose burnt-out autos, gutted buildings and ominous hazards – mines throughout the highway, a bridge collapsed by shelling – in a panorama of desolation.
The Polish-French-Ukrainian manufacturing premiered earlier this yr at Cannes’ ACID sidebar, a parallel section devoted to impartial cinema, and has since been featured at a number of festivals. FRANCE 24 spoke to Hamela on the sidelines of the Cannes Movie Pageant and on the eve of the movie’s French launch following the outbreak of battle between Israel and Hamas. The next interview is condensed from these two discussions and frivolously edited for readability.
FRANCE 24: Are you able to inform us the primary days of the battle and what prompted you to cross the border into Ukraine?
From the second the battle began, I began elevating cash for the Ukrainian military in Warsaw. Only a few individuals believed that Ukraine may survive the battle. There was a mass exodus of refugees who out of the blue landed on the border. It was freezing and there was no preparation from the Polish authorities. So on the third day of the battle I purchased a van and went to the border.
After I arrived, I noticed I wasn’t alone. There have been a whole lot of others like me who had the identical concept. I picked up random individuals and took them to my condominium and pals’ residences. After a number of days we continued organizing [the messaging app] Sign, to seek out homes, humanitarian support, transportation, and so forth. I spoke Russian fluently, so I crossed the border.
It snowballed from there. My telephone quantity appeared someplace on Telegram and other people known as from every kind of nations asking to choose up their kinfolk stranded in Ukraine. I moved nearer to the entrance line and started conducting shorter evacuations from villages to bigger cities and evacuation trains.
How did you discover your approach in Ukraine?
The start of the battle was very tough. There was no info, no maps, no journalists; we did not know the place the Russians had been. You could possibly drive 200 kilometers and uncover {that a} bridge had been destroyed after which need to drive all the way in which again to seek out one other route. I relied on the individuals I met alongside the way in which for details about the roads, the checkpoints, and the whereabouts of the Russians.
When and why did you resolve to start out filming your evacuations?
On the finish of March I made a decision I could not keep alone for much longer. It made me drained, particularly driving at night time. So I requested a great buddy – who additionally occurs to be a director of images and likewise a great driver – to assist me and we determined to take a digicam.
We did not comprehend it was going to be a film. However I knew that what was stated within the automotive was a singular testimony to what these persons are going by and what the method of changing into a refugee is like. Is it the second you cross the border, or the final time you see your house? It’s at this level of journey that you just start to understand it – and this course of is mirrored within the conversations.
How did individuals react to the digicam?
I used to be very shocked by the way in which the digicam motivated a few of these individuals to actually inform their tales. Some had been uncovered to Russian propaganda day and night time, particularly within the occupied territories. That they had the urge to speak to the world and the digicam was the world.
The hazard will increase because the proximity of battle turns into more and more obvious. How scary was it to drive in a battle zone?
There was a giant query of the way to keep the stress all through the movie whereas being nearly fully within the automotive. That is why we constructed this crescendo, each within the construction and within the tales of the passengers. After all there have been many scary moments, however we determined to go away out essentially the most dramatic ones. This isn’t a movie concerning the risks of driving by war-torn areas. I do not need to evaluate my expertise with that of troopers in a battle zone.
There are only a few markers of time and house in your movie. Was it a acutely aware selection?
This was a subject of dialogue from the beginning. I felt that it was necessary for the Ukrainians in our workforce to say locations and dates, to go away a mark on the occasions. In addition they feared that by ignoring the precise combating, we might fail to convey the hazard of the entire expertise. However I feel it was necessary to withstand the temptation to call all over the place we went – together with locations which have since been largely erased, like Soledar [Editor’s note: a town in eastern Ukraine that was captured by Russian forces in January 2023 after a devastating battle].
We needed to erase this concept of time and place, to make a movie that’s not solely concerning the battle between Russia and Ukraine, but in addition concerning the battle expertise itself. What occurs to the individuals within the van has a common high quality that may inform us one thing about what occurs to individuals in Gaza, Yemen or Sudan.
Have been you shocked by the size of the response from the bottom in Poland?
I feel it shocked everybody. I assumed I might be one of many few individuals on the border, however I noticed lengthy traces of vehicles, strange individuals coming to choose up refugees and take them to their properties. It was fairly electrical when it comes to how energized and mobilized society was at first of the battle.
There isn’t any particular brotherhood between Poles and Ukrainians, we’ve got had a generally tough previous. However we even have a typical expertise: for hundreds of years we lived within the shadow of a hungry neighbor, of a looming hazard hanging over our heads. It made us perceive that this battle can also be ours.
Are you involved that help for Ukraine is waning as ‘battle fatigue’ units in?
It’s surprising to see how rapidly the world’s consideration is drifting away from Ukraine, particularly for the reason that current occasions in Israel. There may be actually some type of fatigue. It has develop into rather more tough to assemble and channel humanitarian support for Ukraine.
In the beginning of the battle there was an enormous, spontaneous well-liked motion in help of the Ukrainians, however there comes a time when governments should take accountability. They need to perceive that we can’t freeze the battle. Russia is enjoying a protracted sport. The nation is aware of very nicely that Ukraine can’t survive with out Western help. We’re already seeing that some governments – first Hungary, now Slovakia – are refusing to help Ukraine. It is a tragic mistake.
