It is hard to talk about. Honestly, some movies you watch once and they just sort of sit in the back of your brain like a splinter you can’t quite reach. Mstyslav Chernov’s documentary is exactly that. It isn't just a film. It’s a 95-minute endurance test that somehow managed to win an Oscar while documenting the literal collapse of a city. If you’ve seen the 20 days in mariupol documentary, you know the feeling of wanting to look away but realizing that looking away is exactly what the people in the frame couldn't do.
The footage is raw.
Chernov, along with photographer Evgeniy Maloletka and producer Vasilisa Stepanenko, were the last international journalists left in the city. Think about that for a second. Everyone else had bailed because, well, the city was being encircled by Russian forces. These three stayed. They stayed in a hospital that was being shelled. They stayed while the internet died. They stayed while people were burying neighbors in trenches. It’s visceral.
The Reality Behind the 20 Days in Mariupol Documentary
Most war movies have a narrative arc. There’s a hero, a journey, a moment of triumph. This has none of that. It’s a descent.
When the team first arrives, there’s a weird, tense normalcy. People are annoyed. They’re scared, sure, but they’re still trying to live their lives. Then the strikes start hitting residential blocks. You see a woman crying because her house is gone, and then, suddenly, the scale shifts. It’s not just one house. It's the whole street. Then it’s the whole district.
One of the most haunting things about the 20 days in mariupol documentary is the sound. It’s not the cinematic "boom" of a Hollywood blockbuster. It’s a sharp, terrifying crack followed by the sound of glass shattering. Glass is everywhere in this movie. It’s under people’s boots in the hospitals. It’s falling from windows. It becomes the soundtrack of the siege.
The Maternity Hospital Bombing
We have to talk about the maternity hospital. You probably remember the photos from the news back in March 2022. The woman on the stretcher. The blood-stained blankets.
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In the film, you see the lead-up and the immediate, chaotic aftermath. Chernov’s camera is shaking because, frankly, who wouldn't be shaking? He captures doctors trying to perform surgery by candlelight or with phone torches. There’s a specific scene where a doctor looks directly at the camera and tells the world to look at what is happening. He’s angry. He’s exhausted. He’s basically pleading for the footage to get out so the world can't say they didn't know.
The Russian government later claimed the victims were actors. They said the hospital was a military base. Seeing the raw, unedited footage in the documentary makes those claims feel particularly ghoulish. You see the bodies. You see the grief of the fathers. You can’t fake that kind of trauma.
Why This Footage Almost Never Made It Out
Mariupol was a black hole for information.
By day seven or eight, the towers were down. No 4G. No Wi-Fi. Nothing. The journalists had to scavenge for signals. There’s a sequence where they’re huddled under a window in a stairwell, trying to send a few seconds of video to their editors at the Associated Press. It took hours.
Imagine having the most important footage in the world and being unable to send it. That’s the tension that drives the middle of the film. It’s a race against time and battery life. They were charging their cameras off a car battery at one point. It’s desperate stuff.
Chernov’s narration is sparse. He doesn’t over-explain. He doesn’t need to. His voice is flat, almost numb, which is probably the only way you can process that much death without breaking down on camera. He talks about how he feels like he’s failing because he can’t save anyone; he can only watch. It’s a heavy burden for a journalist to carry.
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The Escape Through the Front Lines
The final act of the 20 days in mariupol documentary is basically a thriller, except it’s real life and the stakes are death or capture.
They had to get the hard drives out of the city. A police officer named Vladimir helped them. He risked his life—and his family's safety—to smuggle the journalists through fifteen different Russian checkpoints. They hid the tiny memory cards in pockets, under car seats, anywhere they could. If they had been caught, that footage would have been deleted, and the world would have seen a very different version of what happened in Mariupol.
What Most People Get Wrong About the Film
Some people think this is a political propaganda piece. It isn't. It’s a witness account.
It’s easy to sit in a comfortable living room and debate geopolitics. It’s much harder to watch a father sob over his teenage son’s body in a cold hospital hallway. The film strips away the "sides" and focuses entirely on the human cost. It shows Ukrainian soldiers, yes, but it mostly shows grandmothers who don’t understand why their kitchens are on fire. It shows children who have stopped speaking because they’re so shell-shocked.
The film also doesn't shy away from the looting. You see locals breaking into stores. It’s messy. It shows how society unspools when the lights go out and the food runs out. It’s a brutally honest look at how people behave when they’re pushed to the absolute edge of existence.
The Legacy of the Siege
Mariupol is different now. It’s occupied. Much of the ruins have been bulldozed and replaced with new Russian-built apartments.
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But the 20 days in mariupol documentary serves as a permanent digital record of what used to be there. It’s a map of a ghost city. When people watch this fifty years from now, they won't be reading a history book written by the winners; they’ll be looking through Mstyslav Chernov’s lens at the actual moment the walls came down.
Winning the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature wasn't just a "Hollywood moment." It was a validation of the risks the team took. During his acceptance speech, Chernov said something that stuck with a lot of people: he wished he never had to make this film. He wished he could trade the Oscar for Russia never attacking Ukraine. It was a somber moment in a room usually filled with glitz.
Practical Ways to Engage with the Topic
If you’ve watched the film and feel like you need to do something other than just sit there feeling sad, there are actual steps you can take.
- Support the Journalists: Follow the work of the Associated Press and organizations like the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). They are the ones funding this kind of high-risk reporting.
- Humanitarian Aid: Organizations like United24 or the Ukrainian Red Cross are still working on the ground for displaced people from Mariupol and other frontline cities.
- Watch with Context: If you haven't seen it yet, prepare yourself. Don't watch it alone if you're sensitive to graphic content. It’s rated R for a reason.
- Fact-Check: When you see "news" about the war on social media, look for the metadata. Look for the sources. The documentary teaches us that the first thing to die in a war is the truth, and keeping the truth alive requires effort from the audience, too.
The 20 days in mariupol documentary is a hard watch. It’s painful. It’s exhausting. But it’s also necessary. It reminds us that behind every headline and every casualty count, there’s a person who had a home, a dog, and a favorite sweater. It forces us to look at the glass on the floor and the blood on the walls and acknowledge that this happened. And it’s still happening in different ways all over the world.
Don't just watch it to be "informed." Watch it to remember what it looks like when the world turns its back, and why we shouldn't let it happen again.
To understand the full scope of the conflict beyond the siege, you should look into the archival reports from the Associated Press from February and March 2022. Reading the daily dispatches alongside the film provides a chilling timeline of how quickly a modern European city can be dismantled. You can also research the work of Frontline (PBS), who co-produced the film, to see their extended interviews with the survivors who managed to escape the city during the green corridors.