’20 Days in Mariupol’ Director Explains When a Documentary Is a “Civic Responsibility”

To Mstyslav Chernov, the unlikely journey that his film 20 Days in Mariupol has taken is “a big miracle.”

First, there’s the fact that the Ukrainian war journalist and filmmaker even survived the production process at all, given that he and his team were filming in Mariupol, Ukraine, as Russia was laying siege to the city in the late winter of 2022. Chernov says he and his colleagues, the only international journalists left on the ground, were eventually hunted by Russian forces and had to be extricated by a special Ukrainian task force. The group managed to smuggle 30 hours of footage past Russian checkpoints to leave the country. 

Later, the resulting film — documenting the hardships of residents from Russian battle tactics as the city fell — would be embraced by the industry and nominated for an Oscar for best documentary feature film. “If anyone told me that in the moment when we were hiding from bombs in Mariupol, I would think it was just a mean joke,” Chernov says now about the Oscar nod.

The film, a collaboration between AP News and PBS’ Frontline, is Chernov’s first feature-length documentary, though it won’t be his last. In an interview with THR, Chernov discusses his next, still-untitled film (which also focuses on the war in Ukraine), the difficulties of reviewing his graphic footage and why he felt documenting the invasion of Mariupol was a “civic responsibility.”

How did you decide that the footage you were gathering should be a documentary instead of for news broadcasts?

I was primarily gathering news footage and making news dispatches for the Associated Press that later were distributed across the world. But until the Mariupol maternity hospital bombing, I did not realize that the story of Mariupol is so significant, so symbolic and big that it needs to be told in a bigger form. It’s only when we left the city, when we broke out of the siege, when I miraculously could carry this 30 hours of footage that I filmed — and at that point, only 40 minutes were published — [that] I realized that what I was looking at is actually a film. 

How did you come to be the only international journalists left in Mariupol?

There are a few reasons. The battle for Kyiv was unfolding, so everyone felt at that moment that the main event of this war was happening in Kyiv. Also, there was a danger of encirclement, and there was a Greek consulate convoy that most of the journalists left with. The only person who I know so far [that] stayed behind was Mantas Kvedaravicius, a Lithuanian documentary filmmaker who was also filming in Mariupol at the same time. Unfortunately, he was trying to leave the same way we did, but later, he got captured and executed by Russians. 

The reason for this attention to journalists is because we were the only ones who were sending images out of the city, and therefore, immediately, our names became known. Official Russian diplomatic channels claimed that we were information terrorists and that we were lying, that we were staging everything. That brought attention to us, and that meant we couldn’t just leave. But at the same time, people kept coming to us and saying, “You have to keep filming. You have to show this to the world. You have to make sure that this is all recorded.” It was such a big responsibility — not only a journalistic or documentary [responsibility], it was just a civic responsibility to do this.

You’ve covered wars before in Ukraine and abroad, but is there anything that felt different or unique about this one?

It’s always different. It all started with Ukraine [for me]: When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2013, I became a filmmaker and war correspondent. Since then, I’ve been through Iraq and Syria and Afghanistan and Gaza and Karabakh and Libya. But I always came back to Ukraine, and I tried and tried to keep reporting from there. And it was always the most emotional story for me. All stories and all civilians affected by war are equally important and equally deserve attention. But when it’s your home, then obviously you are much more emotional. So that actually was a difficulty when we started making a film, and when we decided that I would narrate the film. The challenge was: How do you make sure that I don’t impose my own emotions onto an international audience, to whom we are trying to tell that story? How do I make sure that I’m not moralizing [to] anyone, [that] I don’t just put my own opinions in front? So [there was] a long search for a delicate balance between the film being personal but at the same time quite neutral, even distant at times, so people will feel their own feelings, not my feelings.

How did you find the experience of editing and postproduction, given that it required you to relive some of the atrocities you filmed?

We left Mariupol, and then I went to Bucha and then to Kharkiv, my hometown. And at that point, Kharkiv was heavily, heavily bombed, and it felt like I was back to Mariupol, actually. It was like flashbacks I was experiencing because people in the streets [were] injured with shells and medics [were] rushing them into hospitals, and it’s all just repeating itself and very intensively. And at night, because that was the time when my editor in Boston, Michelle Mizner, was in her office, we were editing the film. And so by seeing what happened to my city, then coming to my room and getting through all the Mariupol footage — part of which I have seen, but I don’t remember even recording — it was really hard. I was really that close to psychological collapse. But we got through that. And actually, there were several discoveries that were made during the editing, like the conversations when the camera drops down: I’m having a conversation with people around me and I just don’t turn off the camera because I’m afraid to miss something. These conversations I didn’t remember, and they became a vital part of the story for me.

Can you say anything about your upcoming film that you’re working on?

Yeah, it is about the Ukrainian counteroffensive that was unfolding in the summer and partially in the fall. The counteroffensive is considered by many people as a failed counteroffensive, but when you actually look closely on the ground, then you see it very differently. You see the struggle, you see the fights for every single meter of the land. You see people liberating their land, but all there is left is just graves and ruins. And it is also very private and personal because it’s about liberation of places of my childhood memories or of people who I spent time with. [With] war films, that’s what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to find the right visual and storytelling language to tell these types of stories. It’s a challenge because you can’t plan these stories. A lot of modern documentaries are planned so well during the production, even before they start filming. It’s not the type of documentary I want to work with. So, I want to get deeper in this cinematic language. I feel that a modern-world documentary could benefit from this type of storytelling. 

This story first appeared in a February stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.