Courtesy The Associated Press and PBS “Frontline” / Photo by Mstyslav Chernov
Even after the international journalists fled the Ukrainian city of Mariupol a few days into Russia’s siege of the strategically valuable metropolis on the border of Russia and Crimea, a team of Associated Press reporters led by Mstyslav Chernov stayed behind to document the atrocities. With 20 Days in Mariupol, Chernov presents an unfiltered look at the footage he and his colleagues obtained in February of last year, proving that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s willingness to commit war crimes and churn out propaganda are unmatched while providing a glimpse into horrors about which the rest of the world might otherwise have never known.
20 Days’ 95-minute run time comprises material culled from hundreds of hours of footage shot while Chernov and his crew languished in ostensibly safe hospitals, apartment building doorways, public plazas, abandoned grocery stores, shelled parks and on and on. And it is vital viewing. Though it’s one thing to read about the conflict in Ukraine, or to see photos, even, or snippets on the nightly news, it’s another thing altogether to watch the raw video.
“Keep filming,” a doctor shouts as he attempts to save a teenage boy whose legs were blown off by artillery. The boy dies, and Chernov keeps rolling even as his father arrives at the hospital to weep over his son’s body. In turns, viewers see city workers filling mass graves in a park; the corpse of an infant wrapped in blankets and stowed away in a basement because there’s no place else for the body; the bombing of a maternity hospital; and a pregnant woman with a shattered pelvis carried out on a stretcher in silence only to die later that day—”She was screaming, ‘kill me!’” a doctor tells Chernov. “She knew her baby was dead.”
If this sounds unthinkable, it is, and if it sounds like the kind of thing one ought not have to watch, that’s also true. But this is how we begin to understand the truth of the matter in Ukraine, and the level of violence not just on the frontlines, but among the people. Amidst denials, calls of fake news from Russian diplomats and national addresses wherein Putin describes the hostilities as self-defense, Chernov and his crew uncover how Russia indiscriminately decimated civilian neighborhoods with artillery, planes and tanks.
Chernov keeps himself out of the story for the most part as he narrates, though he does mention his own daughters on numerous occasions. Mainly, though, viewers follow his crew from hospitals and bombing sites and looted stores. In those first 20 days of the conflict, he says, it’s shocking how quickly the citizens changed. Still, Chernov notes, though the “bad get worse, the good get better;” and there is still beauty to be found in first responders, in musicians providing moments of levity within shelters, of dedicated reporters doing their jobs. 20 Days proves the importance of journalism, particularly in a rapidly changing world that undervalues those boots-on-the-ground reporters who put it all at risk for the sake of documentation—even the people admonish them, and still they do their jobs.
No, this isn’t a feel-good film and it’s important to see if you’re going to understand, even if it hurts so bad at times that all you can do is cry along with the survivors. Sometimes we need to see these things to know, sometimes we cannot and should not look away.
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Editor’s note: SFR film reviews generally include thoughts about pluses and negatives. 20 Days in Mariupol feels more like a public service, however, and we’ve omitted that element as we consider it mandatory viewing.
20 Days in Mariupol
Directed by Chernov
Center for Contemporary Arts, NR, 95 min.
