The new documentary 20 Days in Mariupol is both the most necessary piece of filmmaking I can imagine at this moment and at the same time nearly impossible to recommend.
The director Mstyslav Chernov is a Ukrainian Associated Press reporter. With Putin’s invasion of Ukraine imminent last February, Chernov and his camera crew headed for the busy port city of Mariupol. They knew that Russia would have to gain control of Mariupol if the invasion had a hope of succeeding. Chernov and his crew were there when Russian planes shelled the city to prepare the way for the entrance of Russian troops, and they were there when the troops arrived, shelling houses and apartment buildings and, in one wrenching instance, a maternity hospital. With electricity and Internet access sporadic at best, fewer and fewer hospitals operating, food, water, and medicine increasingly scarce, and every escape corridor from the city blocked by Russian troops, Chernov and his crew did their best to continue to act as journalists. (They escaped after twenty days when a brave Ukrainian policeman risked his life by putting them in his car, along with his family, hiding their cameras and hard drives under the seat and driving nearly 100 kilometers through numerous Russian checkpoints to join up with an International Red Cross convoy given a safe route out of the city.)
At one point Chernov says that he wishes his brain could forget what he is seeing but that his camera won’t let him. What he and his crew saw and what the movie, which will be shown on PBS’ Frontline, documents is grueling, at times close to unbearable. 20 Days in Mariupol isn’t an atrocity exhibit. Yes, we see blood in puddles on floors and stretchers, and yes we see the wounded and dead, sometimes even Ukrainians who die as the camera films.
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