There’s a very good theory that if you want your teenager to talk to you, take them for a drive to do some errands. There’s a detached closeness in sitting side-by-side, eyes able to take in the world around you rather than the person in front of you, that allows people to open up. 

“You’ve got this intimacy where you can’t ignore who you’re traveling with,” In the Rearview filmmaker Maciek Hamela agrees. “People get to know each other in the car. They start talking between themselves. They start talking to me. And I realized that I’m no longer the only addressee of what they’re talking about; they’re talking as if they wanted to get the word out to the whole world.” 

What is the moment when a person decides they’re not going to sit still? It was a frosty morning, Hamela remembers, when the Russian invasion began. The Polish director woke early, in his father’s house, which the family soon turned into a safe house for Ukrainian families. “I was in that house looking out the window, and I’ll never forget that moment. I felt powerless. I felt that that country will not survive, and our world will not be safe anymore, either. That the history is repeating itself again and we cannot do anything about it.”

On Letterboxd, JCMarie writes, “I feel like this is one of the most important films a person could watch right now, as our news cycle is filled with the devastation of war… putting actual faces to the stories revealed is so incredibly important.” From the first gut instinct to get in there and help evacuate his Ukrainian neighbors from occupied territories, through to the chance meeting at his film’s premiere with a wealthy bystander willing to help do more, Hamela has been all-in.

“I bought my first van on the third day of war, and I went straight from the car dealer to the border to bring the first people to Warsaw. Then people started calling me to ask to bring out their families, their friends, and then it just went on like a snowball. I just kept getting phone calls. I couldn’t do anything else. It was just driving and organizing pickups.”

In the Rearview is stealthily cinematic in its intimacy, by accident rather than design: Hamela’s van is the frame within which almost all action takes place. And the action is simply conversations between passengers: stories about a grandfather with a butterfly suit, about a leaping frog, about young men who have disappeared. 

The van is a confessional, a witness stand and a psychiatrist’s couch all in one (but most definitely not a litter box—a much-discussed stop for a cat to relieve itself is a comical, if stressful, high point). There is high tension, but no hysteria. This matters in a daily diet of explosive war images: this is what trauma looks like. As Marianna Neal observes, “what really broke me is the hope these people have to return home soon, kids asking if they can come back to spend time on the beach in the summer.”

Within days of his early volunteer efforts, Hamela knew he would need help: not only to share the driving (he almost fell asleep at the wheel during one evacuation) but also to share the camerawork. His friend Piotr Grawender—“a very good driver, not very talkative, very sensible cinematographer”—joined the journey. After an attempt at rigging the whole vehicle with lenses, Hamela explains, it felt too much like a cage. “We got rid of all the other cameras and we stayed with one camera, on a monopod, held always by Piotr sitting in the front passenger seat, so he had to twist his body a little bit. We would record almost nonstop from the pickup to the arrival with just switching cards in 6K.”

Filming in 6K created a complicated workflow, but they needed the file size to enable flexibility in the edit suite. The vehicle informed other creative choices, such as the soundtrack. “I wanted to keep it as minimal as possible,” says Hamela, so composer Antoni Komasa-Łazarkiewicz (known as Antek to friends) used the many sounds of the car in his sparse compositions in order to keep us within the tiny world of the vehicle. Komasa did convince Hamela to give in to one lyrical piece: a famous Ukrainian poem by the great Lina Kostenko—‘Wings’—put to Komasa-Łazarkiewicz’s music.

A choir of Ukrainian refugees performed the piece with the Lutosławski Quartet at the film’s Warsaw premiere in front of the Palace of Culture. “I lost it,” Hamela remembers. Is it the hardest thing he’s ever made? “I would say so, yeah. And it’s definitely something I never thought would evolve into such a big of a deal. It didn’t start as a film, it started small. We had no financing at all for a very long time, until postproduction.”

After the Warsaw premiere, a man holding a plastic cup full of beer approached the filmmaker. “I thought he was a drunk who was just passing by,” Hamela laughs. It turns out, the man was a wealthy real-estate-company owner who had been very moved by the music. The next day, he brought a large contingent from his company to a screening of In the Rearview, and when Hamela told him that they were fundraising for a new bus for more evacuations, the new businessman insisted that he’d buy it outright for them. The deal was done within two weeks. 

“It was completely crazy,” says Hamela, though nothing much seems crazy to me about what this driven humanitarian filmmaker has managed to make possible.