‘Information can be bent. Emotions are always honest’: the film at the heart of Ukraine’s agonising evacuations

Ivan Sautkin’s work as a volunteer helping people to safety gave him rare access to the trauma faced by people forced from their homes. The director relives the challenges of making the film as it screens in Cannes

There’s a moment in Ivan Sautkin’s new documentary, A Poem for Little People, in which a humanitarian volunteer tries to reason with a group of women filling cans with the grimy water that has collected in a shell hole in their suburban street. They should come with him now, says the volunteer, Anton Yaremchuk. It is August 2022, Bakhmut, Ukraine. Explosions boom, horribly close. Despite the obvious peril, they refuse to go. They ask him: how will they get the money to live if they leave? Yaremchuk, exasperated, states the obvious: if they stay, they could be killed at any moment.

In another scene, an elderly woman who has made the wrenching decision to abandon her apartment, locks her front door with a tremulous hand – then remembers she’s left her crutch inside and has to unlock it again. As she climbs into the volunteers’ minibus, she covers her head with her hands for a moment. As she raises her face again, a whole lifetime of emotions seems to pass across it.