In the Rearview, Maciek Hamela’s documentary about Ukrainians fleeing war in their homeland, won the Grand Jury Award for International Competition tonight at the 30th Sheffield DocFest.
The film premiered in May at the Millennium Docs Against Gravity Festival in Poland before heading to Cannes and then to Sheffield, where it entered competition with eight other documentaries.
“This film started as volunteer work,” Hamela noted as he accepted the prize. “I wanted to say thank you for all the support that the U.K. has given to this amazing humanitarian effort in this war in Ukraine… [It’s] a country that has never been indifferent [to the war].
‘In the Rearview’: A Ukrainian girl holds a paper with vital information about her in case she is killed in the war.
Maciek Hamela
When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Hamela, a Polish filmmaker, promptly volunteered to help evacuate Ukrainian civilians who had become the target of Russian bombing and artillery attacks. He bought a van for the purpose, and later began filming refugees as he transported them to safety across the Polish border. In the Rearview was shot almost exclusively inside the van, and consists of Ukrainians – young, old and in between – reflecting on all they have experienced.
In its citation for In the Rearview, the jury said, “If documentaries matter, if they are relevant and important at all, they must connect us to the lives of others. Crafted with intimacy and delicate respect, we as a jury were stunned by the brilliant simplicity of this film, which makes us all fellow passengers upon a universal odyssey of survival and exodus.”
Irina, a pregnant woman, is carried away from a maternity hospital in Mariupol bombed by Russian forces.
Courtesy Sundance Film Festival
A second Ukraine-themed film, 20 Days in Mariupol, won Sheffield’s Tim Hetherington Award, an honor named for the British photojournalist and Oscar-nominated filmmaker who was killed while covering the Arab Spring uprising in Libya in 2011.
20 Days in Mariupol documents the initial stages of Russia’s brutal siege of the Ukrainian port city, which resulted in thousands of civilian deaths. Director Mstyslav Chernov accepted the award by remote from Ukraine, where he continues to report on the war for the Associated Press. His work for the AP in Ukraine recently won him the Pulitzer Prize.
“Thank you for possibility to show this film [at Sheffield]. We are very, very happy with this news,” Chernov said in his acceptance video, which he recorded with a bombed-out building behind him. “Our team is working now on the front lines. Currently I’m in Kherson region. You can see the destruction [behind me] and I wish to say that the fact that our film won such an important festival as Sheffield makes me hopeful that the world will never forget about the struggle that Ukraine is going through, about all the loss that Ukrainian citizens, peaceful residents of Mariupol, [have] went through. And thank you for giving us a voice. Thank you for giving us your trust and we will do everything to be worthy of that trust.”
Among other awards at Sheffied, Q, directed by Jude Chehab, won the prize for International First Feature.
‘Q’
Courtesy Sheffield DocFest
“Al-Qubaysiat, a women’s religious order born of Syria’s Islamic revivalist movement, has long attracted controversy over its ideology, practices and allegiances,” Sheffield programmers wrote in a description of the film. “For Jude Chehab’s family, it is a wedge that has divided loyalties and caused antagonism between those wedded to the faith and everyone else. In particular, it created an irrevocable distance between the filmmaker, her mother and her grandmother. Weaving together the memories of these three generations, Chehab’s impressive feature-length debut is a heart-wrenching portrait of a domestic environment pushed to breaking point.”
‘The Takeover’
Courtesy Sheffield DocFest
The Takeover, directed by Anders Hammer, won the International Short Film Competition. In the 35-minute long film, the Norwegian filmmaker and journalist “captures the rapidly changing situation in Afghanistan as the Taliban retake control of the country,” the festival wrote. “Re-installing an all-male parliament, banning girls from going to school and restricting women’s rights to work, the Taliban soon find themselves faced with the emergence of groups who bravely take their protests to the streets. Amid all the uncertainty, Hammer documents the female-led protests, the supporters and enforcers of Taliban rule and the mixed response of people across the country, as one regime comes to end and another takes power.”
The Short Film Competition prize automatically qualifies The Takeover for Oscar consideration.
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