Sundance Film Festival 2023: 20 Days in Mariupol (World Cinema Documentary Competition) Review

War correspondent Mstyslav Chernov made his debut at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival, documenting the first 20 days of the ongoing war in Ukraine’s tenth-largest city. 20 Days in Mariupol is harrowing, sensitive, visceral, and reveals bitter truth from the frontline

Even with a steady supply of heartbreaking films coming out of (and about) Ukraine in recent years exploring the Russo-Ukrainian War, no one will top Mstyslav Chernov’s documentary feature as it is harrowing and sensitive, visceral, revealing bitter truth from the frontline.

After working for years covering the war in his home country in 2014, as well as in Iraq, Syria, Nagorno-Karabakh, and Afghanistan, Chernov along with his colleagues Evgeniy Maloletka (Still Photographer) and Vasilisa Stepanenko (Field Producer) plunges into Mariupol in Donetsk Oblast, situated on the northern coast of the Sea of Azov, covering the city as it is been rumored to be targeted by the Russian military.

It is day one in Mariupol, but war does not come with explosions, it comes with silence as the director narrates their journey, and things begin to change very fast in the following days. Here, Chernov’s documentary takes us from streets to residential areas to public facilities used as shelters, to the hospital where civilians lost their souls. Chernov and his team of Associated Press journalists plunge into the war zone to document the death and destruction caused by the war widely disseminated through news media, but how can their journalistic works end up as a 94-minute cinematic experience that shocked this year’s Sundance Film Festival? It is probably because of a few striking, gut-wrenching scenes, such as one in which an old woman who loses her home, one of a policeman unable to do anything, a father who lost his child while playing soccer, and all the residents who implore them to let the world bear witness to Russian misinformation.

20 Days in Mariupol is hard to watch. Chernov’s images are raw and frantic, it shows real-life footage of Russian victims as thely struggle for survival in their city. Yes, it captures the struggles on the ground in intimate detail; people are crying, bleeding, and asking for help, but there are also those who face the camera without any hope, walking through the street as if they don’t care if it’s their last day. But what makes Chernov’s documentary not an easy film to forget or ignore is the fact that it gives dreadful context to the ultimate scenes of how long these conflicts have raged. Mass destruction of a city, corpses in the streets and mass graves, the bombing of apartment buildings and a maternity ward, doctors despairing children they couldn’t save, sure, it is repetitious, but that’s part of the point.

20 Days in Mariupol is produced by Frontline and The Associated Press production and premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival within the World Cinema Documentary Competition.