20 Days in Mar­i­upol review – brave piece of front­line journalism

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.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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