NEW YORK, NY – There are three people who have been single handedly responsible for capturing the harrowing experience in Mariupol in the early days of its siege in February 2022: Associated Press journalists Mstyslav Chernov and his team, Evgeniy Maloletka and Vasilisa Stepanenko.
Risking his life to document the war between Russia and Ukraine, Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Chernov brings his team’s footage to the big screen in the documentary, ‘20 Days in Mariupol’, a documentary as raw and bleak in editing style as in content. Containing footage collected from the three weeks he and his colleagues spent in Mariupol, the film loosely resembles a compilation of short clips filmed on a phone, except that its content is far too visceral and graphic for a typical phone’s camera roll.
It’s not a documentary with a high-end production feel. There are no sit-down interviews with the residents of Mariupol against an extensive lighting setup. Filming can be choppy, capturing the life-or-death situation Chernov and his team were in. Even the sound editing had minimal to no enhancement, keeping in stride with the bare nature of the film. Yet in many ways, this only adds to the overall authenticity. It focuses our attention on the rawness of human emotion. We see (and cannot help but empathize with) a grieving father in a hospital, wailing over the death of his teenage son who has just lost his life to a bombing while playing soccer. A child, tears slowly streaming down his face, fretting for his future. A pregnant lady carried out on a stretcher, a victim of the bombing of a maternity ward.
The documentary’s visuals alone are beyond sufficient to capture the grueling reality that Mariupol has become. But to provide further context to the clips, Chernov considered several possible options for storytelling. “[We] recorded hours and hours of follow-up interviews with people you see in the film who escaped Mariupol, but it just didn’t work. Later interviews diminished the fear and the tension.” In the end, they decided to have Chernov, a Ukrainian himself, narrate the interviews. His voice is somber, an attempt at being somewhat objective and to not detract from the footage itself – he lets the emotions stem directly from the residents being captured. Chernov’s matter-of-fact narration style simply serves as an audio description for the clips themselves or for sharing interviews that were not captured on video. In one memorable scene where people are looting a store with the shopkeeper yelling at them to leave, he recounts something a doctor told him: “War is like an x-ray: good people become better; bad people become worse.”
Q&A with director Mstyslav Chernov after the film screening at the DCTV Firehouse Cinema on July 11, 2023
Chernov’s film also puts into question the delicate role of journalism when there is only one source of truth. Media, without enough context, can be misinterpreted, or even worse, have its authenticity called into question. Towards the end of the documentary, we see several clips from Russian media disparaging Chernov’s work – accusing his shots of being staged, as if they are shot on a film set. As ludicrous as that may seem to Western audiences, it is a way for Russian media to control the narrative it tells its residents by dispelling any notions that they are harming civilians.
When I asked Chernov about this after the film’s screening in New York, he shrugged it off in a blasé yet diplomatic way. His years of expertise in the journalism industry have prepared him well for moments like these. Instead of reacting disapprovingly, he simply tells me a story to highlight his muted optimism. When he was sharing a cab in Rome, he expressed to the other passenger how Mariupol had just burnt to the ground and was understandably upset. “This person told me, ‘Do you know how many times Rome got burnt down?’” He smiles as he adds, “I think what amazed me and the whole world when this invasion started is how resilient Ukrainians are. We didn’t even expect this from ourselves – how much resistance [and] hope there is in this fight.”
As outsiders, we commend Chernov and his team for risking their lives to stay in Mariupol, and perhaps there is a semblance of that felt amongst Ukrainians. Because of his footage, people were able to identify and subsequently rescue injured relatives. And within Mariupol, people leveraged him and his team as a way to stay connected to the outside world, to receive updates on other Ukrainian cities like Kharkiv or Kiev. In a world that is often thought to be so vastly interconnected, it highlights just how fragile these connections are and emphasizes the vital importance of reliable journalism through its absence. ’20 Days in Mariupol’ is by no means an easy watch, but a worthy one for being a profound story at capturing the horrors the residents have endured and a testament to the courage of Chernov and his team in their search for truth.
’20 Days in Mariupol’ was released on July 14, 2023 and is now available to watch in theatres. A full-length interview with director Mstyslav Chernov can be found on our Instagram:
