The winners of the prestigious festival were announced in the northern British city on Monday, Polish state news agency PAP reported.
Hamela’s In the Rearview, a Polish-French-Ukrainian co-production, received the Grand Jury Award for the International Competition, according to officials.
The jury, Kim Longinotto, Rodrigo Reyes and Vinay Shukla, said: “As we journeyed through this cohort of films, we found vulnerable, beautiful visions that hold both craft and story close, opening windows into the heart of our shared humanity. If documentaries matter, if they are to be 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 fellow - passengers upon a universal odyssey of survival and exodus.”
In the Rearview 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, the Deadline website reported.
Film that started as volunteer work
“This film started as volunteer work,” Hamela said as he accepted the Grand Jury Award.
When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the Polish filmmaker was among thousands of compatriots who had volunteered to help evacuate Ukrainian civilians forced to flee Russian bombing and artillery strikes, he told the PAP news agency in May.
Hamela bought a van for the purpose, and later began filming refugees as he transported them to safety across the Polish border, deadline.com reported.
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,” according to deadline.com.
In the interview with PAP, Hamela said that each of the evacuees had been informed beforehand that there would be a camera on board the van so that “they could refuse to be filmed.”
He added: “But even those who had vowed to not say a word in front of the camera, would eventually start talking.”
The filmmaker told PAP: “I quickly sensed that they felt a need to share their experiences not only with me, but with the world in general. For many of them, I was the first foreigner they had seen in months. They wanted to tell me what had really happened to them.”
Hamela said, as quoted by the PAP news agency: “It was a very powerful and important need, also because of the onslaught of Russian propaganda and the disinformation campaign carried out in the first months of the war."
The Sheffield DocFest is Britain’s biggest documentary film festival; the 2023 edition, its 30th, was held between June 14 and June 19, the PAP news agency reported.
Since February 24, 2022, when Russia invaded its neighbour, more than 12.8 million people have crossed into Poland from Ukraine, Polish border guards said on Tuesday.
Meanwhile, 10.97 million people have left Poland for Ukraine since the start of the Russian invasion, the agency reported.
Tuesday is day 482 of Russia’s war on Ukraine.
(pm/gs)
Source: PAP, PISF, sheffdocfest.com, deadline.com