A few days after the Russian invasion last year, Polish filmmaker Maciek Hamela began driving into Ukraine to pick up civilians and bring them to the Polish border. The footage he shot of his many journeys is brought together in the documentary In The Rearview, sold by Cinephil and premiering this week in Cannes ACID.
Those the director picked up included children and old women. They had had to leave their homes behind under considerable duress. Hamela isn’t just helping them toward safety. He is also using them as subjects in his film. What were the ethical dilemmas that he faced? Was there a danger he was exploiting his sometimes traumatised passengers?
“It’s a very good question. The formal idea was to give it [the documentary] a democratic set-up where we are keeping the camera on a wide angle. Whoever wants to speak is the one speaking. We are not focusing on any particular character…”
Almost always, Hamela would be meeting the passengers for the very first time the moment they climbed in his van. Once the journey was over, he’d be unlikely to see them again (although some of them stayed with him or his father after arriving in Poland). The camera was not fixed.
“The first trip, we went out with eight GoPros and I got rid of all of them…we decided to stay with one camera, handheld.” There was a DoP behind the camera. Any passenger uncomfortable at being filmed could ask for the shooting to stop.
The project, which was financed as a Polish-French co-production, presented obvious logistical challenges, There are strong restrictions on filming during wartime, and it is illegal to take images of military bases and checkpoints. Hamela, who had bought a small fleet of vans, was co-ordinating rescue missions and driving frequently himself as well as directing the documentary.
“Everyone was notified by phone by me personally that there was going to be a camera aboard,” the director explains how he briefed the passengers in advance of the journey. “They were kind of prepared for this.”
The passengers were only asked to sign release forms after their journeys were completed. They had the option to refuse. They were never put in to the position that if they refused to sign, they wouldn’t be allowed to make the trip. Hamela fully expected that there would be some journeys where no filming would be possible.
“To my great surprise, this turned out in a completely different way than I thought. People who would initially say that they have nothing against cameras but just didn’t want to talk about what happened, very often they started talking right off the bat, without even me asking them,” the director remembers. “These people had a very big need of talking to somebody and of telling their story.”
The fact that Hamela was a foreigner may have helped. He was an outsider and they wanted him to know what had been happening in their homeland since the Russian invasion.
“We were shooting in 6K. That gave us the possibility for close-ups in post-production. This was, of course, a very challenging endeavour because shooting in 6K for 12 hours straight when you don’t have time to download in between days because you need to get some sleep – it was very challenging. We had to have huge capacity [memory] cards.”
One striking moment in the film shows Hamela driving a badly wounded Congolese woman toward the border. “I was told I was going to be picking up somebody who was walking and had been signed out of the hospital. I was not informed of what state she was in,” the director remembers. The doctor was “flabbergasted” when he turned up and, at first, didn’t want her to travel but her family wanted her “out.” “They knew that Kyiv was bombed. They knew the state she was in and that she was in a hospital that was very poorly equipped.” This was in a period when Bucha was “in flames” and Kyiv was under heavy fire.
“When I picked her up, it turned out that nothing was organised.”
In the end, the doctor gave instructions for the car to be made into a makeshift ambulance with the seats re-arranged and mattresses cut up so she had an improvised bed. Hamela, meanwhile, made the arrangements for her to be admitted to hospital in Poland and then in Berlin at the end of the journey. This is one story with a happy ending. She made it to safety, has now recovered after eighteen surgeries, and is expected at the film’s premiere in Warsaw – and possibly in Cannes too.
The priority was always to get the passengers to safety. The filmmaking came second.
All the journeys were very different. In the first week of the war, passengers were desperate simply to reach safety. As the weeks progressed, there were other issues to consider. Some were fearful of being kidnapped or driven in the wrong direction. At the same time, as on almost every long car journey, the monotony creates a sense of calmness. The van seems like a safe space.
“We were trying to concentrate on the human stories and not to be splashing the screen with fear and war,” the director says. “This is not a typical film shot in the trenches…”
Long ago Hamela, who studied at the Sorbonne, worked in Paris as a tour guide. He speculates that his experiences then may have helped him. “I was very used to eight people who would hop on a bus, often complete strangers, and I would have to settle down the right mood for a trip to Versailles or Normandy.”
As he prepares for Cannes, the director emphasises that wherever the film shows, it should be regarded as “a reminder that the War is still going on…it is so important not to forget about those people who are suffering.”Cinephil took on world sales rights just before Cannes began. The film has also been selected for Millennium Docs Against Gravity (Poland) and for Sheffield DocFest.
