30/10/2024 - In his documentary on the war in Ukraine, Juri Rechinsky slowly unravels how looking after the country's displaced citizens and fallen soldiers is a mammoth task in itself

We never see the war, but we can sense it, and sometimes hear it. What we do see is its aftermath. Ukrainian director Juri Rechinsky’s documentary Dear Beautiful Beloved, which screened in the Features section at the 62nd Viennale after its world premiere in Locarno's Semaine de la Critique, is one of those movies about the war in Ukraine that looks beyond the fighting and the destruction. It wants to explore what happens to the civilians caught in between.

There are Elizabeth and Johnny from the British Expeditionary Aid & Rescue, who are evacuating the last villages close to the frontline – old, sick, and immobile people, those who were left behind, or those who have no place left to hide. The camera quietly observes as the British couple and their helpers are carrying some of them out on stretchers. As the train arrives at its final destination, it bears witness to an overweight sick woman having a heart attack. Whether the rescuers can save her is unclear, and whether the cause of the heart attack was her health or her mental and physical shock is as well.

One step further and actually in the process of leaving the country are the mothers and the children. Amongst them is Kateryna Klymenko, a mother of two who wants to board a train to Budapest. Stuck at the train station and struggling to communicate with international rescuers, everyone is crumbling under extreme exhaustion. From the living, Rechinsky then switches to the dead. A search party crosses now dormant battlegrounds in search of corpses, limbs, and possessions. The area with its barren trees, flipped tanks, and houses in ruins is reminiscent of a post-apocalyptic landscape.

The bodies collected are sorted, cleaned and categorised, put in bodybags, and handed over to Oleksandr Nagayets and his companion, Daria Semenchenko. Oleksandr’s job is not only to provide these fallen men with the last honour of taking them home, but also to manage an abyss of telephone calls, haggling, and negotiating. Constantly rerouting as he has to pick up new bodies on his trip, Oleksandr also deals with phone calls from angry relatives asking when they will receive their dead.

What unites all of these people is the uncertainty hanging over them like a sword of Damocles. “My destiny is to live”, an old lady says as the helpers load her onto a train to nowhere. For now, people take refuge in an old maternity ward, but as the whole room has to move again, fear spreads. “Where to next?” is the big question, and some refuse to leave. Parked into these barren hospital beds, these refugees are a long cry from the old ladies in their richly furbished houses we see at the beginning of the film. Handing them over to their relatives is close to impossible. “Lady, I am at the frontline”, a grandson snaps on the phone. “How am I supposed to pick her up?”

Something is lost, an identity, the point at which these women transitioned from people to simply being cargo, the soldiers from humans to numbers on a spreadsheet. “Where do you want to go?” is a question often posed to the fleeing mothers at the train station. Some do not have a straightforward answer like Kateryna. It seems that “just away from the war” would be the primary response. But “away from home” is also a scary and traumatising proposition.

Dear Beautiful Beloved was produced by Horse&Fruits and distributed internationally by filmdelights.