By Karl Quinn
The standard line from anyone in the running for an Oscar is that it’s an honour just to be nominated.
Not for Mstyslav Chernov, whose 20 Days in Mariupol is one of five features competing for the title of best documentary next month. For him, the nomination comes with an almost impossible weight to bear.
Director Mstyslav Chernov, whose film ’20 Days in Mariupol’ is in contention for the best documentary Oscar next month. Credit: Taylor Jewell
“Right now, when Ukraine is at war, it feels like documentary is the language that the country speaks to the world. It is a big event and a big responsibility,” he says of his film, which records the horrors of the early days of the Russian invasion of his homeland.
“But also, acknowledging that everything in this film exists only because of the tragedy – because people died. I wish it didn’t exist at all. Honestly.”
At 39, Chernov – who is a guest of the Australian International Documentary Conference next month – has spent far too much of his life documenting war zones. The current conflict is his sixth. But he didn’t seek the adrenaline rush of conflict, he insists; it found him.
He was working as a photographer in the medical field when Russian-backed forces shot down Malaysia Airlines flight 17 in eastern Ukraine, near the Russian border, in July 2014. He was one of the first on the scene, and the footage he shot was distributed widely worldwide – within 24 hours, it had been picked up by 1700 media outlets.
Ukrainian emergency workers and volunteers carry an injured pregnant woman from a maternity hospital damaged by a Russian airstrike.Credit: Evgeniy Maloletka
“This is how we started as conflict journalists,” he says, noting that some of his colleagues had been wedding photographers, others game developers, until circumstances forced their hands. “We were not trained for that. We learned how to survive. We learned the rules of international journalism on the go, medical training, basically everything.”
The footage he captured was horrifying and, he was certain, would change the direction of events. “I thought it was going to stop the war. I was sure the politicians were going to sit around the table and make it stop. But almost 10 years since then, things have just become worse.”
Chernov’s work has garnered numerous awards – including a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the siege of the port city of Mariupol that began in March 2022 – but he’s had to adjust downwards his sense of what journalism can achieve.
His film is essentially a catalogue of dispatches from the front lines in the first 20 days of a siege that would ultimately last for 86, tied together with his gentle and weary narration (fellow photographer Evgeniy Maloletka is credited as co-cameraman). But it is also an account of the tension inherent in the game he finds himself in – chasing the most brutally revealing images in the hope they will convey something of the lived horror of the moment, in the hope that the world will see, be moved, and react to stop that horror, all the while knowing that probably won’t happen at all.
“That is something I really wanted to represent in the film too, a part of the feeling that I have, and a lot of my colleagues are having right now, of frustration at our inability to influence or to change things for the better,” he says.
“You can’t stop a bullet with a camera. It feels like you’re useless at times, when you see children dying, and you’re just there to film that, and then things become worse, they don’t become better. That frustration, I really wanted to express.”
But in Mariupol, a whole new tension emerged with shocking clarity for the first time: the battle between documentary evidence such as that captured by him and others and the misinformation spread by Russia.
In the early days of the campaign, Russia insisted only military sites were being targeted. Chernov and others had clear evidence of apartment blocks, schools, hospitals being relentlessly shelled. The shocking attack on a maternity hospital – images of a pregnant woman being carried away, bleeding, on a stretcher (she later died) went viral – was framed by Russia as a piece of Hollywood-style theatre, peopled with actors and tricked up with prosthetics.
This image captured by Chernov’s colleague Evgeniy Maloletka shows residents of Mariupol cowering in a hospital corridor during a missile attack. Credit: Evgeniy Maloletka
Never had the need for images from the front been greater, but never had the resistance to accepting them been higher.
“I wanted to preserve examples of these false narratives that emerged around Mariupol,” says Chernov. “I think Mariupol was actually the beginning and the first example of these large-scale false narratives that we’re now seeing everywhere. The story of Mariupol is also a story of misinformation. It’s just inseparable now.”
That his footage made it out was, he says, “a miracle”. That the film has found an audience and is in contention for the big prize is another. But the real campaign remains the one on the ground, one that remains all-consuming even if the world’s attention has drifted from it.
Russia insisted only military facilities were being targeted, but images captured by Chernov proved otherwise.Credit: Evgeniy Maloletka
“Ukrainians will definitely keep fighting because they know what happens if cities get occupied,” says Chernov. “People get tortured, arrested, stripped of their Ukrainian identity, and killed. So they fight for survival, they fight for their freedom, and these are not just abstract words, these are very real fights that are happening.”
And the fight, he believes, extends well beyond his country’s borders. “If Russia wins this war, that will be a signal to all other countries in other parts of the world that they can do whatever they want and it will go unnoticed and unpunished,” he says. “And that is dangerous for the whole world.”
20 Days in Mariupol will stream exclusively on DocPlay from March 7. Mstyslav Chernov will appear at the Australian International Documentary Conference (AIDC) at ACMI in Melbourne, March 3-6, with a free public screening of his film at 6.30pm on Monday March 4. Details: aidc.com.au The 96th Academy Awards are on March 10 (US time; March 11 Australia), broadcast on 7 and 7Plus.
Contact the author at kquinn@theage.com.au, follow him on Facebook at karlquinnjournalist and on Twitter @karlkwin, and read more of his work here.
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