20 Days in Mariupol

In February 2022 a three-person team from a news agency enters Mariupol. The siege begins, and while every other journalist leaves the city, they stay. For twenty days they film in the hospital, in shelters and in the street. The internet is cut, the power goes, and getting the footage out becomes a problem in itself. The subject is not the war but what the record is for. The film's sharpest passage comes when the footage reaches the world and the claim that it is fake spreads behind it. The team learns this and keeps filming; that is exactly why the documentary exists. The form is raw footage and a narrating voice. There is little editorial intervention; the director says in his own voice what he saw and what he was thinking. Some images are unbearable and the film does not cut away. It was made by the Associated Press with PBS Frontline. Mstyslav Chernov's footage was published as news during the siege and the documentary was built from that material. It won the Oscar for documentary feature and became the first Ukrainian film to win one; accepting it, Chernov said he would rather never have made this film. Who it is for: anyone who can watch war journalism and first-hand documentary. Who it is not for: anyone unprepared for images of the dead and wounded; the warning is real and the film softens nothing.