Polish filmmaker brings Ukrainian refugees’ plight to Cannes

Issued on: 22/05/2023 – 19:58

The war still raging in eastern Europe made a stark reappearance at the world’s premier film festival late on Sunday, when a woman dressed in the blue and yellow colours of the Ukraine flag covered herself in fake blood on the red carpet ahead of a gala premiere, before being spirited away. The protest echoed a red-carpet incident last year that saw an activist strip off her clothes to reveal the words “Stop raping us” written across her torso, next to a flag of Ukraine. 

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been a distinctly less prominent topic in Cannes compared to last year, when President Volodymyr Zelensky opened the festival with a video-link address urging filmmakers to challenge Russia like Charlie Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator” took on Adolf Hitler. Films by and about Ukrainians featured prominently in the 2022 line-up, including “Mariupol 2” by Lithuania’s Mantas Kvedaravicius, who paid with his own life for his efforts to document the city’s destruction at the hands of Russian forces.

With the country’s film industry now virtually at a standstill, the lack of Ukrainian films at Cannes is no surprise. But Ukraine hasn’t vanished altogether. Last week’s opening ceremony saw French film icon Catherine Deneuve, who graces the festival poster this year, recite a poem by Ukraine’s Lessia Oukrainka, declaring, “I no longer have either happiness or freedom, only one hope remains to me: to return one day to my beautiful Ukraine.” 

Deep in the Palais des festivals, the festival’s main venue, the sprawling Cannes Film Market has hosted a series of events in support of Ukraine’s film industry. Panels touched on such topics as filming through the war and fighting Russian state-sponsored video piracy. Film projects in development also enjoyed plenty of attention, including a feature titled “Bucha”, based on the true story of a Kazakh refugee who helped save dozens of civilian lives in the martyred town north of Kyiv.

Polish filmmakers have taken a leading role in portraying the conflict at their doorstep, reflecting their country’s front-line role in dealing with the fallout from Russia’s invasion. Among them is Lukasz Karwowski, whose “Two Sisters” follows a duo of Polish half-sisters who journey through war-torn Ukraine looking for their father. 

Escape from Ukraine 

Hamela’s “In the Rearview” chronicles a different type of journey, documenting the massive exodus of civilians triggered by the war in Ukraine. Shot over a period of six months, it follows the director’s van across the war-torn country as he collects hundreds of refugees stranded by the conflict and drives them to safety. 

As the film’s title suggests, Hamela’s on-board camera is mostly turned towards the passengers at the back of the van, capturing their distress after harrowing experiences as they drive away from the fighting, leaving behind their sons, husbands and homes. Some passengers sit quietly, dumbstruck. Others recount tales of destruction, torture and death. There are light-hearted moments, too, when they open up to share their hopes and aspirations for the day the war ends.

Sometimes the camera looks ahead, revealing burnt-out vehicles, checkpoints and ominous dangers – mines across the road, a bridge gutted by shelling – in a landscape of desolation. 

The Polish-French-Ukrainian production screened at Cannes’ ACID sidebar, a parallel segment dedicated to independent cinema. FRANCE 24 spoke to Hamela about the experience of filming in a war zone and the Polish response to Europe’s worst refugee crisis since World War II.

FRANCE 24: Can you talk us through the first days of the war and what led you to cross the border into Ukraine? 

The moment the war began I started raising money for the Ukrainian army in Warsaw. Very few people believed Ukraine could survive the war. There was a mass exodus of refugees that landed all of a sudden at the border. It was freezing cold and there was no preparation from the Polish government. So on the third day of the war I bought a van and went to the border. 

When I arrived I realised I was not the only one. There were hundreds of people who had the same idea. I picked up random people and took them to my apartment and those of friends. This is how it was possible to avoid a scenario where people would be held in refugee camps. 

After a few days we got organised on [the messaging app] Signal, to find apartments, humanitarian aid, transport, etc. I was fluent in Russian, so I went across the border. From there it snowballed. My phone number appeared somewhere on Telegram and people started calling from all sorts of countries, asking me to go pick up their relatives stranded in Ukraine. I went closer to the front line and started doing shorter evacuations from villages to larger cities and evacuation trains. 

How did you find your way around Ukraine? 

The beginning of the war was very tricky. There was no information, no maps, no journalists; we did not know where the Russians were. You could drive 200 kilometres and find a bridge had been destroyed and then you had to drive all the way back to find another route. I relied on the people I met along the way for information about the roads, the checkpoints and the Russians’ whereabouts.  

When and why did you decide to start filming your evacuations? 

By the end of March, I decided I couldn’t keep going alone for much longer. It was wearing me down, especially the night driving. So I asked a close friend – who happens to be a director of photography and a good driver, too – to help me out and we decided to take a camera.  

We didn’t know it was going to become a film. But I knew that what was being said in the car was a unique testimony to what these people are going through and to what the process of becoming a refugee looks like. Is it the moment you cross the border, or the last time you see your house? It’s in this moment of travel that you start realising – and this process is reflected in the conversations.

How did people respond to the camera? 

I was very surprised by how the camera motivated some of these people to really tell their story. Some had been exposed night and day to Russian propaganda, particularly in the occupied territories. They had this urge to speak to the world and the camera was the world.  

There is a crescendo of danger in the film as the proximity of war becomes increasingly apparent. Just how frightening was it to be driving in a warzone? 

There was a big question of how we could maintain the tension for the length of the film while being almost entirely in the car. So that’s why we built this crescendo, both in the structure and in the stories of the passengers. Of course there were many terrifying moments, but we decided to leave out the most dramatic. This is not a film about the dangers of driving through war-torn territories. I don’t wish to compare my experience to that of soldiers in a warzone.  

There is no special brotherhood between Poles and Ukrainians, we have had a sometimes difficult past. But we also have a common experience: for centuries, we lived in the shadow of a hungry neighbour, of an imminent danger that hangs over your head. It made us understand that this war is ours as well.