‘The soldiers want you to see what they’re going through’: the heartbreaking follow-up to 20 Days in Mariupol

While Mstyslav Chernov was on the Oscars circuit with his first Ukraine war film, soldiers in his latest – made using bodycams – were dying. He explains why he needed to join them in the trenchesIt was in Sloviansk, in the rear of eastern Ukraine’s frontline, that I first met journalist and film-maker Mstyslav Chernov. It was the autumn of 2023 and he was telling me about the film that would later win him and his team an Oscar: 20 Days in Mariupol, a horrifying documentary assembled from the news footage he and his team had gathered there, in the first month of the full-scale invasion. That September day of our interview, though – amid what would turn out to be Ukraine’s disappointing counteroffensive of 2023 – he was making his second film, one that took him to the heart of the combat zone, called 2,000 Meters to Andriivka. It is, if anything, even more powerful than its predecessor: a piece of frontline reporting that truly deserves the name, its footage gathered from soldiers’ own bodycams as well as from Chernov and his small crew on the ground among them. He puts the viewer into the trenches alongside the combatants. It is terrifying, bloody and heartbreakingly sad. You will not emerge from this film unchanged.The soldiers on whom Chernov focuses are members of Ukraine’s 3rd Assault Brigade. They have a mission: to liberate the village of Andriivka, in the Donetsk region, and hoist the blue-and-yellow flag above it. Their sole route to this village is through a narrow strip of forest with flat, open fields either side. The wood, with its sketchy cover, is both their protection and, in many cases, their grave. The painful, dangerous advance through this 2km provides the structure of the film. And yet, for all that the film borrows the conventions of a thriller for its propulsive plotline, it is its tenderness, both in its gaze and in the relationships between the men that it depicts, that really destroyed me. Continue reading...

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