As a visceral and immersive piece of front-line war coverage, Ukrainian filmmaker and journalist Mstyslav Chernov’s film 20 Days in Mariupol presents a savage and often desperately bleak portrait of a city under siege, and reflects on the bravery of those struggling to survive within it.
On the eve of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Chernov and a team of Ukrainian journalists entered the strategic eastern port city and set about recording the subsequent siege and assault as bombs fall, inhabitants flee, and access to electricity, food, water and medicine is cut off. This material has been reframed into a feature documentary which acts as a moving testimony to both the suffering and the determination of those living in this shell-shocked city.
The team – the only journalists left in the city – struggle to cover the atrocities and send their footage out to the world. Eventually surrounded by Russian soldiers, they shelter in a hospital, unsure of how they’ll escape. Seeing so much death, Chernov and his colleagues wonder whether the reporting will make a difference. But the locals are adamant that Chernov and his colleagues keep on telling their story – if only to act as a counterbalance to the “fake news” that emerges from Russian media.
The immersive observational nature of the film is exemplified in the opening scenes as the journalists watch from distance as Russian tanks sporting the letter Z painted on their sides roll into the city. A Ukrainian commander informs via radio that he is with the reporters and that he can see the ominous Z. As the tank turret slowly turns to where the observers are positioned they all have to turn and run…the siege has quietly and terrifyingly begun. As Chernov states: “Wars don’t start with bombs, but with silence.”
Chernov and his colleagues Evgeniy Maloletka and Vasilisa Stepanenko offer vivid depictions of what it is like living in a city under siege. Like the locals they take shelter from air strikes, emerging from basements along with scores of others to bear witness to death and devastation. These moments are appropriately harrowing – from a pregnant woman rushed to hospital only to lose her life as well as that of her child, to a football playing youngster being blown up – but sadly and disturbingly simply represent the awful reality of life in the city.
While 20 Days In Mariupol is very much a film about the grim realities of being a war correspondent it also raises important questions (and questions regularly faced by those in this occupation) about the ethics of undertaking a job that involves recording disturbing footage aimed to draw attention to the situation, and how professionalism weighs alongside personal feelings and sense of conscience.
Astutely assembled from hours of material, editor (and producer) Michelle Mizner does a striking job in offering up moving personal stories alongside the expected footage of bombs, devastation and military hardware. In amongst a plethora of films and television representation of the war in the Ukraine, 20 Days in Mariupol stands out as a compassionate and vivid story of the awful realities of living under siege.
At the end of the film and on-screen message announces that Mariupol fell on day 86 of the conflict and that some 25,000 died in the siege.
Ukraine, 2023, 94mins
Dir: Mstyslav Chernov
Production: Frontline PBS, Associated Press
Producers: Michelle Mizner, Mstyslav Chernov, Raney Aronson-Rath, Derl McCrudden
Cinematography: Evgeniy Maloletka
Editor: Michelle Mizner
Music: Jordan Dykstra
Sales: Dogwoof
