The United States has been involved in a lot of wars, but within living memory they’ve all been fought somewhere else. That means that most Americans have no clue what it’s like to be a civilian living in a war zone, unless, of course, they have had that experience in another country. It’s no small thing to live with the day to day knowledge that you and your family, without being directly involved in the war, could easily become collateral damage whose demise will be noticed barely, or not at all, by the people organizing and funding the fighting.
Since civilian casualties typically outnumber military casualties in modern wars, it’s important that any consideration of war (for instance, whether fighting is the best way to resolve a dispute, or whether the United States should get involved in a conflict taking place in another part of the world) should be informed by the understanding of what the war will mean for civilians living in the area. It’s quite different from the way war is usually presented on the evening news, and certainly not anything that can be reduced to a simple formula or abstraction.
Fortunately, human beings have the wonderful power of empathy, and movies have an amazing ability to communicate emotional and psychological meaning within contexts. While viewing a movie about the experience of being in a combat zone is not the same thing as actually having that experience first-hand, it’s certainly a way to spark further reflection or open a discussion on the topic. It’s also a good way to combat empathy fatigue (“is that conflict still going on?) which can result in rather unkind reactions to suffering taking place elsewhere.
Maciek Hamela’s documentary In the Rearview offers an excellent opportunity to learn something about the experiences of civilians fleeing the war in Ukraine. The film’s genesis is a story unto itself: Hamela, a filmmaker from Poland, decided in the early weeks of the Russian invasion of Ukraine to purchase a van and drive people to safety. Yes, things sometimes are just that simple: people are in mortal danger, I can do something to help, so I will do it. He later hired a second driver to split the driving duties and to act as a cameraman recording the experiences of the refugees as well as the conditions they were driving through on the way to safety in Poland.
Most of the time, the camera is focused on the passengers, who talk to each other and directly to the camera about their experiences, where they are going, and what they are leaving behind. Their remarks mix the catastrophic and the prosaic, and seldom does anyone lose their composure, no matter how harrowing the experiences they are relating. The van sometimes gets stopped at checkpoints, and sometimes it has to change routes because the road ahead has been bombed. Sometimes it travels through normal-looking countryside, and sometimes through a desolate landscape of destroyed buildings, while news reports heard over the van radio give some indication about the current state of the war at a more abstract level.
One man puts his wife and children in the van, telling the driver “I’m leaving you with what is most precious to me” then says he can’t come with them because he’s joining the army the next day. A woman speaks about how she regrets having to leave her cow behind, particularly since she was a “good Ukrainian cow” that would eat anything, including lard. Another recalls the Russians taking down the Ukrainian flag in her village, forcing everyone to sing the Russian National Anthem, and then taking away the young men serving in territorial defense. A young man shares his experience of being tortured by the Russians (“The first time, you’re afraid, but afterwards, not so much”) which reminds an older woman of Soviet atrocities committed against Ukrainians during the Great Purge of 1937.
The passengers also have hopes and dreams of a better future. A young woman, pregnant in a land where medical services are uncertain at best, dreams of going to Paris and opening a café. Children are mesmerized by the sight of the ocean and make their mother promise to bring them back when the war is over. The ultimate impression In the Rearview creates is that of ordinary people doing the best they can under difficult circumstances, aided by one man who decided he could make a difference. | Sarah Boslaugh
In the Rearview is available on VOD from Film Movement Plus.
