Oscar-winning Ukrainian filmmaker Mstyslav Chernov sat down to talk with Alexander Nanau, himself nominated for an Academy Award in 2021, about 2000 Meters to Andriivka, in which Chernov and AP colleague Alex Babenko follow a Ukrainian brigade as they battle through approximately one mile of heavily fortified forest on their mission to liberate the Russian-occupied village of Andriivka.
The filmmaker turns the lens on his fellow Ukrainian soldiers to determine who they are and where they come from, and to witness at first hand the impossible decisions they face in the trenches as they fight for every inch of their land.
Nanau was reminded of Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket in its depiction of war not as something grandiose, rather as a series of small events that “happen one moment to another.” Chernov has had experience in other war zones, such as Iraq and Afghanistan, but how does he “relate” to these events happening in his own country? And what keeps him going, Nanau wanted to know.
Chernov acknowledges the “grandiose” aspect of the war, but also the “very, very, very personal and small world” of the film.
“When I was a kid, I would go to those forests, play in them with my friends, hide-and-seek. Or we’re playing war, running after one after another. My grandmother would tell me stories about my grandfather fighting in the Second World War in Donbass. Again, in those forests, in those fields, because that’s the same place where the frontline was for a long time during the Second World War.”
But it is also a very small world within which the soldiers are trying to survive, and which they are putting their lives on the line to protect.
“Part of the film was recorded with my camera, but many, many battles are recorded by the soldiers themselves. And by that, we can get right into their perspective,” Chernov underlines. “It can’t be more personal than that…vision from the eyes of a soldier – or when I get into those trenches, when I get with them to walk through that little forest, squeezed by minefields, leading to a little village…”
Click on the link above to see the whole conversation between Mstyslav Chernov and Alexander Nanau.
