Juri Rechynsky was born in Turkmenistan in 1986, and raised in Ukraine. He studied at the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute and at the Karpenko-Karyy National University of Theatre Institute. Worked as an editor and then as a director for television programmes. He made a number of commercials, television, short and feature films. The completed his debut feature SickFuckPeople in 2013. Four years later, he directed Ugly, which was produced by Ulrich Seidl. He currently resides in Vienna,

His latest creation Dear Beautiful Beloved premiered earlier this year at the Locarno Film Festival. This documentary portrays the war in Ukraine with unflinching honesty and sobriety, The outcome is jarring, and a call-to-action impossible to ignore. He exposes a reality that should never be normalised.

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Natalia Serebriakova – Why did you decide to combine these two stories: the evacuation of elderly people from border areas and the transportation of soldiers’ bodies?

Juri Rechinsky – It’s about the evacuation of the living and the dead. It’s quite simple. If you think about the title, it applies to all of these characters. And also to the children being evacuated. Why did I leave Austria and come to Ukraine to film all of this? I realised that I could no longer watch the war through the news. Because very quickly, images, texts, and some informational triggers start to repeat in your mind. You lose some sensitivity. You wake up, read the news, and see that 27 people have died. And you think, “Well, that’s not so bad, because yesterday there were 50.” This is what happens to all Austrians, to everyone watching the war through the news. It was important for me to understand what lies behind these numbers, what one death means, what one life means that they are trying to save.

It turned out to be a very complex and long process. For these elderly people, whom you see in the film, it is dangerous because not all of them can survive it, simply due to their health condition or stress. Not to mention that during the evacuation, these people might come under shelling or bombing. The same goes for the evacuation of the fallen – it’s also dangerous work. Our characters do it quite heroically, in my opinion. For example, for search teams, it’s dangerous because everything is mined: tripwires, cluster bombs, mines… And for those transporting the bodies of the fallen, there is danger there too. These are military personnel, and every day they drive to places like Kostyantynivka, where they are specifically targeted. So, they change the locations where they pick up bodies. They don’t do it at one morgue; they hide because it’s constantly being hit. Some volunteers, like Bulldozer [a character in the film, a driver who delivers bodies to families] and his team, lost a few people to exhaustion. Ukraine is a large country, and the road journey can take up to five days. A few drivers simply fell asleep at the wheel and crashed.

NS – And as I understand, at the beginning of the full-scale invasion, you volunteered in Vienna?

JR – I was looking for where I could be useful, how I could help. I was also meeting close friends and acquaintances at various borders. I even met my own family. I don’t remember which day, but in the first week, I was already at some border, picking someone up. I saw what it looked like. It also had a very different effect than the news. When you’re on a crowded train station platform, feeling the crowd and seeing the state of the people arriving, you understand something about their journey from small details. About how hungry the children might be. About how scared the mothers might be, dropping their children on the ground or overturning strollers simply out of stress. This was my first encounter with the real face of war in a specific group of people. The film is made up of these moments.

NS – How did these elderly people react to being filmed?

JR – There wasn’t really any resistance from them. We got to know most of these people when they were being evacuated, still in their homes. We traveled with volunteers, who searched for apartments, entered them, and I would go in with them and say, “We’re a film crew, can we come in?” And later, in a calmer or less active situation, like in the bus, a more personal connection was established. Generally, if you help carry a grandmother down the stairs and then bring her a plate of borscht, that’s the contact right there.

Another thing is that, for example, when I met people at train stations and at border crossings with Ukraine in March 2022, many wanted their situation to be seen. They perceived it as an injustice, as violence, as an insult. It was important to them that this violence, this insult, wasn’t left unheard or unseen. So, there were people who reacted to the camera even more than I needed. Some wanted to tell their whole story immediately. They got off the train, saw the camera, saw me and the person would start talking for half an hour, very emotionally.

NS – What organisation was responsible for evacuating people? We see foreign volunteers in the frame…

JR – There were many different organisations. There were British volunteers, who, as a rather autonomous unit, collaborated with the large organisation East SOS. They also had crews evacuating people from Donetsk region and, I believe, across Ukraine where needed, since they’ve existed for a long time. Then there’s something like Ukrzaliznytsia, which has evacuation trains from Pokrovsk, in Donetsk region, to Dnipro. They have their own people: special conductors, evacuees, medics. And at the station in Dnipro, for example, a lot of people worked with the organisation Save Ukraine. It’s also a powerful structure in terms of shelters and evacuations along the front line.

NS – You evacuated people from dangerous places like Bakhmut, Kostyantynivka, Kramatorsk, Druzhkivka. Weren’t you scared?

JR – Yes, it was scary. But fear wasn’t the dominant feeling or the hardest one to deal with. We consciously chose to go there, and there was a sense that we were in the right place, doing what we had chosen to do.

NS – Were you really under shelling, under bombs while doing this?

JR – Maybe not directly under bombs, but near the shelling – probably, yes. When I traveled with volunteers during the preparations for filming, I realised I couldn’t bring the crew to Bakhmut because it would be an unjustified risk. It was already so intense and dangerous there that you started thinking about more global questions about your life: how satisfied you were with it, whether you had done everything you wanted to. Could you die now? I remember there were five-storey buildings in Bakhmut. And there was always an elderly person on the top floor who couldn’t come down on their own. It was also very difficult for neighbours to evacuate people from the top floor. If there was an elderly person on the first or second floor, they were taken out. But the fifth floor was usually left behind. So, we arrive at this five-storey building, no one is there, nothing is left, and the shelling begins. You just hear the explosions happening all around you, getting closer and closer. The three of us – me and two British volunteers, Johnny and Elizabeth – had to quickly and carefully carry a grandmother down and then try to get out of there, which was quite difficult because no navigation worked anymore. You either go by experience or by instinct. So, yes, it was scary, but you find some balance between the risks that make sense and those that don’t. But we had experienced people in the team who had been working in war zones for a long time.

NS – Do you have PTSD from your film?

JR – Yes, I do. It’s hard for me to watch it. I watched it from beginning to end with the audience at the premiere in Locarno, and I think that’s it – I won’t watch it again.

NS – How did you manage to edit it? Was it a long process?

JR – I edited it for a year, and editing was harder than filming. Because during filming, you’re often in some adrenaline-fuelled situation, and you’re not alone—you’re with a crew. In the crew, everyone is responsible for each other, supporting one another. It was much easier to survive the shocking experiences together. We talked a lot after each experience. We did debriefings, shared what we saw, what we felt. That really helped us get through to the end of filming. Plus, if you end a hard day somewhere warm, and you’re all in one piece, you have your arms and legs, you’re alive, your heart is beating, and you can breathe—well, that’s happiness in itself. But then, during editing, it was just two people: me and the editor. And every day, you face this material again. By the end, it was very hard not to lose your mind. Because we had a lot of “family reunion” scenes, for example. We filmed them for a long time. How do you choose the ones we ended up choosing?

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Juri Rechinsky is pictured at the top of this interview. The other image is a still from Dear Beautiful Beloved.