Everyone else was gone: the authorities, the aid workers, also the other journalists. A week after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Associated Press video journalist Mstyslav Chernov was still in the port city of Mariupol, watching from a high floor of a hospital as a tank with a white Z pulled up next to it. Smoke continued to rise, bitter and black, from the shelled blocks a short distance away. There was no way out. Mariupol was now surrounded. Chernov kept his cameras rolling.
“20 Days in Mariupol”, a brutal and truly important documentary, takes us into the initial brutality of the Russian siege of a city whose name has become synonymous with the inhumanity of this war: My Lai, Srebrenica, Aleppo, Mariupol. The AP journalists were the last of an international news organization in town, documenting pregnant women fleeing a bombed-out maternity hospital for three weeks, the elderly and the displaced boiling snow to fetch fresh water, the freshly dug ditches where children’s bodies were laid to rest. The coverage would earn Chernov, along with his colleagues Evgeniy Maloletka, Vasilisa Stepanenko and Lori Hinnant, this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, but because internet connections were sparse to non-existent in the city, Chernov was only able to broadcast a small portion of his footage during the siege. It all comes to the fore in ’20 Days in Mariupol’, where the struggle for survival in southeastern Ukraine intertwines with the struggle to tell the world what’s happening.
This movie is very hard to watch, and it should be, although the episodic structure makes it a bit easier to get through: day 1 through day 20, one by one, from the first bombs to the flight of the team to safety. On the morning of Feb. 24, Chernov and his colleagues head toward Mariupol, a city of half a million people on the Sea of Azov, and drive past Ukrainian military bases whose anti-aircraft systems are on fire — the first Russian targets, to clear the way. to prepare. of their warplanes. Many residents doubted the violence would reach Mariupol, and evacuation trains left the city half empty. Now we follow them to makeshift shelters: a cold basement, a CrossFit gym. “I don’t want to die,” says a young boy. “I wish it would all end soon.”
But on Day 4, the fighter jets are overhead and Chernov is stationed in one of Mariupol’s remaining open hospitals, about a mile from the front line on the outskirts of town. He’s there when an ambulance rushes in and paramedics perform CPR on a 4-year-old girl named Evangelina, critically injured after a Russian grenade landed near her home. The medics race her to the humble emergency room, where her blood spills onto the floor as they attempt to resuscitate her, but are unsuccessful. (Chernov blurs her face here, even though the AP published uncensored footage at the time.) “Keep filming,” the head doctor urges — and a minute later we see the same footage of the doctors at work in grainy reproduction on an MSNBC broadcast and the British ITV News.