84 min | NR | August 16, 2024 | Film Movement
Maciek Hamela drives a van through a war zone, pulling Ukrainian civilians out one carload at a time. The camera never leaves the back seat, and everyone who climbs in gets the same question. Where are you coming from, and where are you going.
In the Rearview never leaves the inside of a van. Maciek Hamela drives Ukrainian civilians out of occupied and shelled territory, and the camera rides in the back seat with them. The passengers climb in carrying children, pets, plastic bags, and whatever they grabbed before running. The film is not about the front line. It is about the people the war has put in motion and the question Hamela asks each of them. Where are you coming from, and where are you going.
The passengers are real people on the worst day of their lives. Children climb in beside grandmothers, pregnant women, and neighbors who have lost their homes. Some talk constantly to fill the silence. Others stare out the window and say nothing for miles. Hamela keeps himself mostly off camera and lets each person set the terms of the conversation. The youngest passengers unsettle the film most, because they relay violence in the flat voice of children who do not yet know it is supposed to break them.
Maciek Hamela directs, writes, and drives. He mounts his cameras inside the vehicle and never cuts away to the destruction outside. The windows do the establishing work instead. Burned checkpoints, military traffic, and empty roads slide past in the corner of the frame while the conversation holds the center. The editing braids many separate trips into one continuous ride, so the van becomes a single moving room that fills and empties and fills again. The engine, the road noise, and the occasional distant blast are the only score the film needs.
In the Rearview makes its argument through restraint. It never shows a battle and never needs to. The war arrives entirely through the people fleeing it and the things they say between checkpoints. Hamela understands that a refugee crisis is not a number but a sequence of small decisions about where to go and what to leave behind. By refusing to step out of the van, he makes the audience sit inside those decisions for the length of the ride. There is no arrival in this film, only the next person who needs to get out.