Two years of war in Ukraine: Series “In Her Car”: Four square meters of hope

Cars are the perfect chamber venues. At the same time open and limited, yet silent in the storm and rigid on the outside, flexible on the inside, they force drivers and those in danger to come to terms with themselves and the surroundings rushing past in a very small space. From 30 km/h onwards, no matter how fast you go, there is no way to escape from each other without an accident, but there is plenty of risk of collision. This is even more true when the vehicle is on the run from something much larger than its own small world. In front of Putin’s army, for example.

At the beginning of the ZDF neo series “In Her Car”, it has long been standing in front of Ukrainian territory, ready to attack. Nevertheless, the psychologist Lydia (Anastasiya Karpenko) still wants to go to Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine to get a divorce. Out of a trained willingness to help, she takes the chubby Olga with her towards the Russian border. Almost 500 kilometers of driving to mentally prepare for war. Almost eight hours of time to start a conversation despite socio-cultural differences. About her sisters, with whom they both have arguments. About false fingernails as an expression of female self-assertion. About the upcoming war of aggression and its consequences. About everything that two complete strangers in a four square meter Skoda mid-range car tell each other as they pass military checkpoints and monster traffic jams.

A country in a state of emergency that literally welded the women together at the end of their odyssey. So much so that Lydia decides to evacuate more stranded people “In Her Car”. Whether your rolling escape room rolls as a replacement for the collapsing infrastructure for yourself or for others remains a matter of interpretation.

“It’s your nature to play the selfless one,” ex-husband Dimi (Igor Koltovsky) blasphemes before she drives his young girlfriend to Poland in the second part as a condition of the divorce. There, where her daughter pleads “You can’t save everyone” because Lydia turns around to try to do exactly that in an outdoor chamber play that Eugen Tunik wrote with his co-director Arkadii Nepytaliuk.

True theatricality in five acts, each with three or four individual fates that describe on a personal level what is currently happening to the world as a whole. The husband’s lover and the father-to-be with a dark secret. The gay warrior’s grandma and the Red Cross helper from France with a heart condition. In addition, Lydia’s problems with family and friendship; Dimi’s financial behavior, which is constantly recounted in flashbacks: they are miniatures of Shakespearean dimensions that hold up a mirror to humanity.

Luckily, in the European co-production by Starlight Media and Gaumont with ZDF neo, France Télévisions, plus SRF, SVT, DR, NR, RUV, YLE, they don’t do it with a raised finger, but with casual symbolism. Here a gas station where suddenly there is only gasoline for uniformed people, there body bags in front of the bombed apartment building, in between dialogues like the one about whether Lydia had “taken the safe road,” to which she asked tonelessly: “Are there still safe roads?”

This everydayness in a state of emergency makes “In Her Car” a miracle of proof of the self-destruction of a species that, since the days of the cave, has primarily secured its sublimity through auto-aggressive means. And just as Eugen Tunik occasionally sprinkles in a few piano tones, but only occasionally melancholic violins and chorales, he only imposes the least on us. Not even a real sense of doom. On the contrary: When his leading actress Karpenko follows her inner voice with defiant seriousness and helps where help seems pointless, she lets humanism shine in a light that makes all mindfulness seminars appear pale.

On the second anniversary of Putin’s campaign of extermination, which violated international and human rights law, “In Her Car” is therefore much more than a real-time description of everything that war does to, from, and among people; It is a five-time, 30-minute, practically non-stop, captivating beacon of humanistic resilience, which also appears to be deeply feminist without wanting to be cringeworthy.

Series like this cannot slow down, let alone stop, the fatal narcissism of the Putins, Trumps and Höckes. However, they can provide hope that no one who opposes them is alone. Even in the tiny Skoda mid-range car, if in doubt, you can find like-minded people like the Ukrainian psychotherapist Lydia – even and especially if they don’t look like that.

»In Her Car«, 5 x 30 minutes, now available in the ZDF media library; February 27th, 11:05 p.m. on ZDF neo