'So many scary moments' Chronicling civilians forced to flee from Ukraine's frontlines

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.

- Charlotte Higgins

It is August 2022, Bakhmut, Ukraine. Explosions boom, horribly close. Yet 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 lifetime of emotions seem to pass across it.

Such decisions were momentous junctions in the lives of those filmed by the Ukrainian documentary maker. For the evacuees saying goodbye to Bakhmut, it really was the last time: the Russians bombed the city to the ground before occupying its ruins last spring.

"It shows the value of home," said Sautkin, a 52-year-old with a rakishly curled moustache, who trained as a painter before turning to film-making. He was speaking at the Kyiv offices of the film-making collective Babylon'13, before his presentation of the film today at Cannes.

"Ukraine is fighting mostly not against somebody, against Russia; we are fighting for our homes, fighting for our values, fighting for the people we love, for the happiness we build.