By Robert St. Martin
Los Angeles, CA (The Hollywood Times) 1/8/24 – In The Rearview is a fascinating documentary that was largely filmed in a van with a camera turned on the riders who were being shuttled by Maciek Hamela out of Ukraine at the beginning of the Russian invasion of the country in 2022.
The film screened at the Los Feliz Theatre in Los Angeles on Sunday courtesy of the American Cinematheque. It is one of 15 films shortlisted for Best Documentary at the 2024 Oscars. Maciek Hamela is the director of the documentary In the Rearview, but directing was probably the least important job he had during the filming of his debut feature in Ukraine and Poland.
This is a road movie that is simple in concept and devastating in execution.
One group of refugees after another rides out of Ukraine and into Poland, talking about why they’re leaving and what they’ve left behind. Cameras in the front seat are pointed at the passengers. When one group gets out, another takes its place. And slowly, methodically, it adds up to a wrenching portrait of the human side of war – faces to remember rather than faceless statistics.
For many of those journeys, Hamela himself served as the driver, with the film made up almost entirely of what happened inside the car during trips through the devastated landscape. He may have directed the movie, but there wouldn’t be a movie unless Hamela first got the refugees out of Ukraine.
A resident of Warsaw, Hamela volunteered to shuttle Ukrainians from one part of the country to another, joining volunteer organizations that provided a lifeline for the massive shift in population caused by the Russian invasion.
With a series of cinematographers as co-drivers, his car provides a confessional space where these individuals tell their stories. He drove his van during the day, and the cameramen, of which there were many, took the wheel at night. Many of the treks departed from the eastern territory of Donetsk, occupied by Russia since 2014.
Some tales are truly harrowing, and some are uplifting; some moments concern things as banal as an escaping cat needing to relieve itself or the everyday challenge of getting all the luggage to fit in the back of a vehicle.
Contrast this to heading in one direction only to have a bridge recently blown up, the bypass road a mucky mess where even army vehicles are left stuck in the mire. There’s no real attempt to give context, because all the context we need is within the confines of this car.
“Everything we own, we’re leaving it, ” one man says, mournfully. “We set the dogs loose. What could we do?”
A woman talks about the cow they had to leave behind, until an elderly man cautions her, “Stop talking about the cow, you’ll start crying again.”
There’s a pregnant young woman who’s serving as a surrogate mother – but the agency shut down during the war and stopped answering her calls, so she’s got to get out rather than pursuing her dream to open a café. Another group talks matter-of-factly about being tortured by the Russians. “The first one is the worst,” says a man. “Then you get used to it.”
And above all, there are the children. A little girl who looks out the window and says, “Such beautiful buildings, not bombed at all.” Another girl who hasn’t spoken since a bomb blew the door off a room where she was standing. A five-year-old who’s permanently scared of airplanes, and who plays rock-paper-scissors but adds her own sign: a gun.
The cameras occasionally move outside when passengers are picked up or let off, and news sometimes comes through on the radio or from soldiers at checkpoints. (A common directive: You can’t keep going down this road, it’s been mined.) But for the most part, we are inside the car with the kind of people who, when they’re asked where they want to go in Poland, answer, “Doesn’t matter. Anywhere in Poland that is safe.”
The trips go through bucolic fields and countryside, but also around bomb craters and through devastated cities. And the editing, especially in the first half of the film, is purposefully jumbled: It shifts from person to person, from one carload to another, from day to night with no attempt to introduce these people. We don’t get to officially meet them, but we do get to know them, passengers in a car that never stops except to pick up or drop off refugees and casualties.
Hamela focuses on the civilians, mostly women, children, and older men, offering a complementary counterpoint to the on-the-ground fighting captured in Mstyslav Chernov’s “20 Days in Mariupol” – another film on the Oscar documentary short list this year. His riders include a potty-trained cat, a woman from aristocratic lineage, now a self-declared “traveling frog.” According to the film, one million Ukrainians left the country after the first week of fighting.
Though the horror of war hovers in the background, there is a strong sense of hope that, at least for now, Hamela’s passengers will be safe. At the Q&A after the screening, Hamela explained in detail how the film was shot, revealing that the pervading experience in his shuttle van was the initial silence of the passengers and then their need to talk about what they had gone through with the Russian invasion and their attempt to leave Ukraine.
The precise editing of the film solidified the focus on the stories of the passengers rather than the more front-line news story devastation of the war itself. One woman from a besieged Mariupol recounts in an offhand manner a horrific family tragedy, which she has likely repeated dozens of times. As she describes what happened to her mother and father, she’s unaware of how the tragedy is affecting and upsetting a passenger sitting in front of her. In the Rearview provides a refreshing and candid snapshot of the normal and the horrific.
The film provides a different experience of the humanity of ordinary civilians during a war – a welcome respite for war-weary, burned-out audiences. In some ways, “In the Rearview” is reminiscent of “Manakamana” (2013), directed by Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez, a documentary set in the mountains of Nepal, with its many iterations of people and animals going up and down the mountain in a cable car, to and from the Manakamana temple housing a goddess.
That is a film with no “story”, no real narration, no guide to help us understand what’s going on. In this sense, “In the Rearview” is a fine example of immersive cinema and definitely worth viewing.