Of the many heart-wrenching, angst-ridden docs to come out of the Ukraine-Russian war, which is now rumbling on towards its second anniversary, 20 Days in Mariupol ranks as one of the most shaking. It has won literally dozens of awards since its Sundance bow last year, including the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, and is currently a top contender in the Academy Awards Feature Documentary category.
It was made by a small team of Associated Press journalists who arrived in the ill-fated city just before it came under attack by the forces of Putin’s Russian Federation, and who stayed behind weeks after it was “safe” to film the emerging conflict. The images they managed to get out of a city almost bereft of Internet and phone connections include the bombing of a maternity hospital, the destruction of entire streets and neighborhoods, the heart-breaking death of children and teenagers in hospitals without antibiotics or painkillers, and the siege of a city without food, water, light or honestly much hope of surviving.
Happily their footage did get out, and it became the lead story on news shows around the world in those crucial first days of the war. Filmmaker Mstyslav Chernov, a seasoned war correspondent born in Ukraine, is telling the story of his own community here in his first feature documentary, giving the events another dimension. He stays off-screen as he coolly narrates what he sees – elderly women crying as they wander the streets alone, in a state of hysteria; doctors and nurses crying as they watch children and babies die from shrapnel wounds; Russian tanks marked with a big Z sinisterly circling the hospital where the TV crew has taken shelter. The graphic content of the images reaches a peak in shots of mass graves and men carrying the unnamed dead on blankets to deep trenches scarring a field.
But often, a note of anguished survivor’s guilt comes into the director’s voice and he wonders whether he should stop filming and do something immediately useful, like calming people down. Eventually he and his team, which include photographer Evgeniy Maloletka and producer Vasilisa Stepanenko, will manage to get out of besieged Mariupol with a Red Cross convoy, leaving the smoking ruins behind them. But many residents – perhaps 75% of the population — remained behind after Russian troops broke through the city’s defenses.
This is anything but a story about heroic reporters – the whole team remains off-camera throughout. Yet the influence and relevancy of the media underlie every scene. Chernov has doubts about the value of what they are doing, shuttling between bombs and sniper fire and the eternal search for an Internet connection to send their material to distant editors. On screen at least, these doubts are put to rest by the faith in the media demonstrated by the citizens under siege. A furious doctor shouts at them to film the dead children in his hospital and show the world that Putin is lying about his peaceful invasion that doesn’t target civilians. Later we see snippets of Russian spokesmen scornfully call these graphic images mere montages of old footage and “fake news.” But for the people of Mariupol, what the TV crew is doing is of the utmost importance, and the audience believes in it with them.
A nimble policeman, Volodymyr Nikulin, is so convinced of the urgency to show the world what is really happening in Mariupol that he takes it upon himself to escort the team around to the hotspots. He takes calculated risks to show them where the fighting is, where bombs have taken out entire swathes of the port city, where civilians are dying helplessly in dark airless basements and under rubble. Eventually, he and his family get the crew through the Russian checkpoints and out of the country.
As a director, Chernov brings the same lack of sentimentality we see in the film’s unvarnished imagery. His personal preoccupations – seeing his two daughters again, for example — are rarely allowed to peep through, if not in his anxious desire to create a historical memory. His idea that war is an X-ray showing what people are like inside recalls Valentyn Vasyanovych’s haunting films, like the prize-winning Atlantis, shot in 2019 before the current invasion. Adding more breathless urgency to the terror-paced editing done by Frontline producer and editor Michelle Mizner is Jordan Dykstra’s throbbing dodge-the-sniper score. There is little that is musical in these synthesized sounds that never let up, which are often reduced to no more than a dark heart beat pounding faster and faster, out of control.
Most strikingly, there is a strange feeling of déjà vu watching scenes that have been expertly edited together in a chronological crescendo of tension. The young, heavily pregnant woman carried out on a stretcher from a maternity hospital that has just been bombed is one unforgettable image burned into many viewers’ memory, and the fact that it is so familiar blunts its shock value to some degree. Whether this is a good or a bad thing obviously depends on what the viewer wants: a horror film, or a deeply compassionate document that gives voice, sight and sound to the first twenty days of a major European war.
It would take another 66 days for Mariupol to fall on May 20, 2022, with a death count that the filmmakers put well over 20,000.
Director, screenwriter, cinematography: Mstyslav Chernov
Producers: Mstyslav Chernov, Michelle Mizner, Raney Aronson-Rath, Derl McCrudden
Field producer: Vasilisa Stepanenko
With: Volodymyr Nikulin, Liudmyla Amelkina, Zhanna Homa, Oleksandr Ivanov, Irina Kalinina, Anastasiya Yerashova
Editing: Michelle Mizner
Music: Jordan Dykstra
Photographer: Evgeniy Maloletka
Production companies: Frontline, Associated Press
World sales: Dogwoof Sales
Venue: Barberini cinema, Rome
In Ukrainian, English
94 minutes
