J Paul Johnson
One might not think a film consisting almost exclusively of people talking in the backseat of a moving vehicle could hold attention, but Polish director Maciek Hamela’s documentary In the Rearview, a stunning work of cinema verité that truly walks its walk. Visually, the film is restricted almost entirely to a single fixed perspective, looking backward at Ukrainian refugees crowded in Hamela’s own volunteer aid van, with only occasional glimpses of their war-torn homeland outside the van window. But the film’s high stakes and its characters’ intense passions make it must-see documentary for anyone who wants to understand the plight and resolve of the Ukrainian people.
In 2022, when Russia escalated its war against Ukraine, Hamela bought a van and dedicated himself to helping the refugees, most of them women and children, evacuate their decimated cities and relocate to safer territory. It’s dangerous work, crossing through military checkpoints, war zones, and hostile territories. The passengers are resolute despite having lost everything except the clothes on their back and the few possessions they can carry. Hamela, who had lived and studied in Ukraine, found his work a full-time commitment and more: within weeks he had bought two more vans and was organizing transport for dozens of refugees each day, taking them from Lviv, Kyiv, Cherkasy, and other Ukrainian cities to safety at the Polish border.
Their stories—told by themselves to Hamela as they ride in his van’s backseat—are moving. One young woman serves as a pregnancy surrogate to support herself and plan for the future, but her clinic is bombed out, forcing her to relocate. An older woman can’t help but cry thinking of the cow and the small house she has likely lost forever. A young woman with multiple injuries lands in Hamela’s care, forcing him to give medical care and seek a hospital that will take her. And yet, each of Hamela’s passengers, collectively, form a portrait of a nation in crisis, under siege, but ultimately resolute and determined to carry on.
That the documentary exists at all seems a minor miracle. It’s clear that the volunteer aid is urgent work: the visual of smoking rubble, the looming presence of the hostile forces, the worry etched in the refugees faces make that clear. Even so, Hamela discovered a way he might capture his passengers’ stories to share with the world—without compromising his own near-constant service. He enlisted a cinematographer who could film during the day, then replace him on a second shift as driver during the night, allowing his aid activities to be carried out the same way as before. Even so, any available funding needs to go first to the humanitarian cause, and the filming operation needs to be quick, clear, small, easily hidden, unthreatening, and unobtrusive. Setting the small zCam f6 (the same used as a crash-cam on Mission Impossible–Dead Reckoning) at a fixed height with a wide-angle lens on a monopod allowed it to pan to focus on individual passengers, taken outside for exterior shots—or even, out of necessity, hidden quickly at military checkpoints.
There is no extra-textual content in In the Rearview. The subjects speak to their driver, Hamela, and to each other, but not with any lower-third chyrons, voice-over narration, or “expert” commentary from detached onlookers. The van makes for an intimate space, a confessional of sorts for deeply held emotions and anxieties, ones expressed in the presence of strangers forming a common bond by virtue of their shared plight. It’s an approach that requires expert editing to stitch together each group of passengers’ individual stories and the arc of the overall narrative as a whole both, and In the Rearview manages both tasks expertly.
It’s a documentary that walks the walk. Most filmmakers can at best offer their subjects some reciprocity or notoriety. Hamela, in driving dozens of now-homeless refugees across a war-torn Ukraine every day, has managed to create a documentary that lets these people tell their own stories, and he does so without ever losing sight of, or even slowing down at, his humanitarian mission. In its own way it is every bit the equal of other recent, excellent documentary films charting the consequence of Putin’s war—in particular, A House Made of Splinters and A Rising Fury—that in doing so, make clear the criminality of Russia’s invasion and the plight of those who suffer its consequences.
In the Rearview premieres on North American streaming and VOD services August 16, 2024, courtesy of Film Movement.
