Kyril, aged 18 months, struggles for his life after a Russian rocket hits the family’s apartment block in the early days of the siege of Mariupol, Ukraine, in March 2022. In vain, his mother pleads “You couldn’t save him?” to the also tearful doctor. Then, in disbelief, “How?” She weeps over the tiny, swaddled corpse, opens the covering briefly to kiss her son’s head a last time, then covers it up again.
This is just one scene from what feels like a cinematic siege of the soul: 20 Days in Mariupol by the Associated Press Ukrainian cameraman and now director Mstyslav Chernov. The film premiered at the Docudays UA international human rights documentary film festival in Kyiv last weekend and won the main prize at a ceremony temporarily adjourned – after an air-raid alert – to a metro subway shelter. The first UK screening will be at Sheffield DocFest on Wednesday.
It is a brave, visceral, merciless masterpiece. I’ll stake a claim, for what it’s worth: after decades of war reporting, and watching hundreds of films about war, there are few, if any, like this. Chernov’s film documents Russia’s shocking war crimes against Mariupol on a vast, epic scale, in counterpoint to detail so intimate it borders on unbearable, as it should.
One moment, we are on a rooftop above the ravaged city, smoke billowing from people’s homes and hospitals into a leaden sky. The next, we are in the immediate aftermath of yet another missile attack on civilian housing, eye-to-eye with those escaping or to the rescue – a purposeful bedlam. Or asking a man unloading bodies into a mass grave how he feels: “If I start talking, I will cry,” he answers. “What am I supposed to feel in this situation?” These bodies are at least in black plastic bags. Later, they are simply exposed corpses, piled into the pit.
A pregnant woman is filmed on a stretcher after Russia’s attack on the Mariupol maternity hospital. We learn subsequently from a shaken medic: “Her injuries were incompatible with life; we did all we could. A dead child was extracted.” Like a miracle, in a later scene, a baby is born.
There is something inevitably powerful about films on the war at this festival in Kyiv, because audiences watch documentaries about the attempted destruction of their country and people in real time, as it happens beyond the walls of Zhovten cinema in the historic Podil quarter. After watching 20 Days in Mariupol, a police officer called Volodymyr, who helped Chernov to escape, and some of the medics in his cast made an appearance. The standing ovation was so effusive that dogs present joined in, barking.
After the last international journalists left Mariupol on day five of the assault, Chernov and his crew were the sole reporters remaining. “We made that decision beforehand,” he says. “I knew Mariupol would be a target. I knew what was going to happen, and I expected it of myself to stay – a sense of duty.”
Chernov discloses a remarkable detail: he shot only 30 hours of film in Mariupol for this 94-minute documentary. He was shooting for news items – only 40 minutes of which he managed to get out, and efficaciously so – and this is partly why the film is so raw; there’s little time to breathe.
“It comes from the habit of thinking quickly and shooting news,” says Chernov. “I did film hours of people who then made it out, and others I could reach, but decided the film should stay in the siege so as to keep the urgency and claustrophobia. It seemed important for the audience not to know what happens.”
But, he reflects: “News was not enough for me to convey my thoughts, ask the questions I wanted to ask.” He marks the words of a doctor: “War is like an X-ray: all human innards are visible. Good people become better; bad people become worse.”
And Chernov thinks as he films: “Thousands have died. We keep filming, but everything stays the same.” He cites police officer Volodymyr, who “said that the image of a dead child will change the war, but we have seen so many deaths, how can we change anything?”
Chernov and I discuss the pointlessness of our work as war reporters, the obverse to whatever impact we hope to have. “It raised questions about what we do and the effect of our work,” he says. “We are frustrated that we can do so little, but that same frustration makes us want to do more. They’re similar feelings, actually, to those of the doctors and firefighters in the film.”
Chernov confronts the dilemma all serious war journalism faces, between the portrayal of “victims” and “survivors”. At a discussion panel, Chervov urged “stories of resistance” rather than “stories of suffering” – we agree that you cannot define people by the crime committed against them. And in his film, Chernov walks that high wire with cogency, professional skill and personal empathy: there are few depictions of suffering as ruthless as this, yet in each “victim”, there is resilience – very Ukrainian.
After one attack, a woman with a face pock-marked by shrapnel tells Chernov, “I’m good, I feel fine” because her main focus is on her neighbours: “Here, I’ve got your things...” Later, Chernov says, she was taken away on a stretcher.
Chernov makes the point with recourse to the backstory behind a brother and sister he films in a hospital corridor, each grieving the loss of a child.
“I filmed those children – four little feet on the gurney - but couldn’t use that. The brother and sister buried their children in a yard, escaped, but then managed to go back ready to give them a proper burial. But the Russians had dug them up and put them with others. So they went through hundreds of decomposing bodies to find their own children, which they did, to bury them properly in the cemetery, just days before the rest were put into a mass grave.”
The atrocity against Mariupol is probably – so far – the most egregious war crime on European soil since the second world war. There are an estimated 25,000 dead in Mariupol, “though the total is probably treble that,” says Chernov.
When and if this siege and occupation enter an arena of international (or indeed Ukrainian) justice, Chernov’s film will be crucial as evidence, especially regarding the maternity hospital bombing. We discuss the necessities and limitations of such prosecutions, whether or why our work can or cannot help.
“As we see more and more war crimes in Ukraine, I’m daunted by the thought of how much work needs to be done,” he says. “I know who did it – the Russians – but that’s not enough for a court. And work on Mariupol can’t even start until the city is de-occupied.
“But I’m doing this for the criminals, to send a message: whatever you do, someone will be there to record it and tell the world what you’ve done.”
