Ukrainian Associated Press journalist Mstyslav Chernov chronicles the the invasion of the port city of Mariupol.
Within the past year, Ukrainian journalists, photographers and documentary filmmakers have been faced with the challenge of a lifetime: to document the unjustifiable Russian invasion of Ukraine and the unspeakable atrocities committed against their people. Associated Press (AP) video journalist Mstyslav Chernov and his colleagues, photographer Evgeniy Maloletka and field producer Vasilisa Stepanenko, were initially in the port city of Mariupol to cover the situation as it was unfolding, but when they found themselves trapped in an active war zone, they didn’t seek a way out. Instead, they took refuge in an abandoned hospital and soberly document the violent siege of the city.
Edited as a diary spanning 20 days, AP’s raw footage lies at the epicentre of a literal hell on earth, depicting the remnants of destruction: the bombing of a maternity hospital, a heavily pregnant woman dying, parents crying over their dead children, corpses disposed in mass graves, a vast industrial city turned into rubble in under three weeks. The key structural motif is established early on in the documentary: for each day of Mariupol’s invasion we are shown Chernov’s extended footage, followed by the much shorter clips of the footage that was just shown, edited for television and shown by media networks worldwide.
Within these 20 days, AP’s was the only footage about the destructive siege that was shot and broadcast, with the aim of getting these images out to the world and sway international opinion against the Russian media’s efforts to win a propaganda war predicated on the basis of spreading misinformation by describing incidents such as the maternity hospital bombing as a staged event with paid actors, orchestrated by Ukrainian authorities. When not documenting gruesome images of war, Chernov and his colleagues look for pockets of cellular signal in Mariupol’s unsafe streets in order to send their footage to be broadcast.
As Chernov’s camera lays bare the devastation on the ground in Mariupol, depicting deeply upsetting, only lightly censored footage in the process, his stoic narration gives extra context for some clips and shares details from interviews that were not captured on video. And so this becomes a film about the horrific war crimes committed in Mariupol, the resilience of the Ukrainian people, as well as the fraught role of a journalist attempting to tell the story of this city.
It’s far from an exploitative pursuit, and more an unsanctioned, unadorned representation of reality. And yet, there lies an innately voyeuristic quality within the documentary form and the wider dialectic between filmmaker, subject, and spectator – a voyeurism that is here catered for through heavy-handed, intrusive narration and an eerie, melancholy score, that, albeit rendering 20 Days in Mariupol a potent, unforgiving account about raising awareness, keep the doc from transforming into a self-reflexive document about war-time journalism.
In her 2003 essay Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag offers a profound rethinking of the representation images of war, suffering and atrocity and ultimately poses that in the face of the horror of war, “we cannot fall into indifference or amnesia: we must keep our eyes and our conscience open”. With war journalism taking its place amongst the sheer volume of still and moving images in the ever-expanding digital landscape of content, violence now firmly resides amongst animal videos, memes and online discourse. Crises seem less urgent, distant, dulled by the mechanical wear of swiping fingers.
“Compassion is an unstable emotion”, Sontag writes, “it needs to be translated into action, or it withers.” A film can’t end a war, and perhaps Chernov isn’t the one who will provide a potent enough answer to the question of, how can film awaken outrage at war and injustice without further dulling our senses. What we can do, like these journalists, is bear witness to the pain in the hope that it transforms into an urgent, rallying cry, and address our universal capacity to connect with the pain and suffering of others.
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Published 5 Oct 2023
Commending the bravery of journalists documenting such horrific historical events.
It feels wrong to give an enjoyment rating, but this is an admirable effort under agonising circumstances.
Gruesome. A brave piece of frontline journalism.
By Katie Goh
The challenges and ethics of showing life in an active conflict zone were a key theme of the festival's 2022 edition.
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