WARSAW, Poland — When Polish filmmaker Maciek Hamela first began evacuating Ukrainians fleeing Russia’s war on their country, he wasn’t intending to make a film. He was one of the many Poles extending humanitarian aid to neighbours under attack, and had turned down an offer to film a television investigation there, according to AP.
But the reflections of the people he was transporting to safety in his van were so poignant that soon he began filming them. He asked a friend who is a director of photography to help him film — and drive — and directed his camera squarely back at his passengers as they traversed their war-scarred land.
The result is “In the Rearview,” a documentary film being shown at the Cannes film festival in France as part of a parallel programme devoted to independent cinema. It is not in competition.
A Polish-French co-production, it takes place almost entirely in Hamela’s van, with the camera capturing the harrowed passengers, one group after another in countless journeys made between March and November of 2022.
The result is a composite portrait of men, women and children traversing a devastated landscape of bombed-out buildings and past checkpoints with dangerous detours caused by mines and collapsed bridges and roads.
The 84-minute film shows a little girl so traumatised that she stopped speaking. There is a Congolese woman who was so badly injured that she has undergone 18 operations since Hamela evacuated her. A mother with two kids who pass by the Dnieper River; believing it to be the sea, the kids ask their mother if she will take them there after the war.
“The way we set up the film was to see the reflection of the war in these very small details of ordinary life and the life that we all have,” Hamela told AP in an interview in Warsaw before he flew to Cannes.
There is also some humor, with one woman commenting ironically that she had always wanted to travel. A woman escaping with her cat saying it needed a bathroom break.
In order not to exploit the people he was helping, Hamela told them a camera was in a car before he picked them up. And they only signed forms giving him permission to use the footage after they had arrived safely at their destinations so they would never feel that was a condition for his help.
“In the Rearview” also documents one of the many Polish efforts to help Ukraine. When Russia launched its all-out operation on Ukraine on February 24, 2022, there was a massive grassroots effort to help across Poland, with regular people taking time off work to travel to the border with Ukraine to distribute food. Some picked up strangers and took them to shelters or even into their own homes.
Hamela began on day one to raise money for the Ukrainian army. By day three he had bought a van to transport Ukrainians from the Polish border and convinced his father to open his beloved summer home to strangers.
Soon Hamela heard from a friend of people in eastern Ukraine needing to be rescued, and he began driving to the front lines of the war to pick them up. Some emerged from basements where they had been sheltering in terror.
When the war began, Hamela had been working on a documentary about a crisis at Poland’s border with Belarus. Large numbers of migrants from the Middle East and Africa had been trying to cross that border in 2021.
Poland and other European Union countries viewed that as an effort organized by Russia’s ally Belarus to destabilise Poland and other EU countries.
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