13/09/2023 - Polish filmmaker Maciek Hamela turns his experience of driving Ukrainian refugees to safety into a unique combination of observational and interventionist documentary

Polish filmmaker Maciek Hamela is a graduate of the Sorbonne and a long-time contributor to the BBC, who has produced ten films but only directed his first feature-length documentary, In the Rearview [+see also:
trailer
film profile], when the Russian invasion of Ukraine started. On the third day of the war, Hamela, a fluent Russian and Ukrainian speaker, bought a van and headed off to help refugees get to Poland. The film world-premiered at Cannes and has just had its North American premiere at Toronto.

Production-wise, it seems like a simple film: Hamela is driving, and one of the four credited camera operators (Yura Dunay, Wawrzyniec Skoczylas, Marcin Sierakowski and Piotr Grawender) is filming him and the passengers in the back. The people whom he drives, mostly families, alternate every ten minutes or so, and from each of the segments, we do not learn anything about the war that we didn’t already know, but we get something much more valuable: true human interaction.

It’s not only about horrifying testimonies, even if these are very present and often devastating. Rather, it’s the feeling of safety that they gain from the fact that they are heading out of their war-torn country which often relaxes them, and we see everyday people with everyday problems, joys and grievances. This also includes two unusually well-behaved cats.

One family talks about the cow they had to leave behind, along with their possessions, and this brings tears to the old woman’s eyes – as if it’s only now that she is realising the true scope of their loss. A surrogate mother, who is pregnant with the child of a man from the West, is doing this in order to gather money to start a pastry shop, the bright young woman’s life-long dream. As a wife is packing her husband and daughter into the van, she asks her spouse where the key to the cabinet is. The girl has stopped talking since their house was shelled, but another little girl that she is sharing the ride with lifts her spirits with a children’s book, and she smiles and howls like a wolf. Another vivacious little girl notices how the buildings of a city are beautiful because they have not been “bombed at all”. A Congolese woman, who had been studying in Kyiv for ten years, has been shot – possibly by Ukrainians, who didn’t trust three black people and an Azeri driver. Hamela has to keep changing her catheter until they reach a hospital in Poland.

Occasionally, the camera looks at the destruction outside the car, and the dangers are manifold. Mines on the road, a collapsed bridge, Russian checkpoints that Hamela hears about on the phone – it’s almost as suspenseful as a car-chase movie, except there is no one who is literally chasing them and they can rarely drive very fast.

There are observational documentaries, and then there are interventionist ones, and the director has managed to merge them into a film that is not only exciting, emotional and coherent, but also rich in atmosphere and meaning. In fact, Hamela doesn’t truly intervene by changing the characters’ paths with his actions; instead, his activism allows them to be themselves once again. Even if being a refugee is a humiliating experience, with him they get some of their dignity back, and it is obvious on their faces, even as some of them break into tears. A gorgeous montage with a quick alternation of passengers, set to Antoni Komasa-Łazarkiewicz’s chilling musical theme, seems to sublimate all of these elements before the final act of the film.

In the Rearview is a co-production by Poland’s Affinity Cine and Impakt Film, France’s SaNoSi Productions and Ukraine’s 435 Films. Cinephil has the international rights.