94 min | NR | July 14, 2023 | PBS Distribution
Mstyslav Chernov and a small Associated Press team are the last international journalists left inside Mariupol when the Russian army surrounds it. For twenty days they keep filming while the bombs fall and the lies pile up. The camera is the only thing left telling the truth.
Mstyslav Chernov is an Associated Press video journalist who drives into Mariupol an hour before the Russian invasion begins. He stays. As the army encircles the city and the rest of the international press leaves, Chernov and his small team become the last reporters inside. The film is assembled from the footage they capture over twenty days under siege. This is not a war film in any conventional sense. It is a document about the act of witnessing and about what it costs to get the truth out of a place built to bury it.
Chernov narrates in a flat, exhausted voice that refuses to perform its grief. He films photographer Evgeniy Maloletka working beside him, the two of them running toward explosions while everyone else runs the other way. He films doctors who stop trying to save a child and turn straight to the lens and demand that he show the world. He films a police officer, Volodymyr Nikulin, who shelters the team and later helps get their footage out of the city. The people on screen are not subjects so much as collaborators in an act of evidence. Their insistence that he keep filming becomes the moral engine of the whole thing.
Chernov directs and writes the film, laying retrospective narration over footage shot in the chaos of the moment. The cinematography is handheld and lit by whatever light is available, and the instability is the point. The editing imposes a structure of numbered days onto events that felt like one unbroken emergency. The sharpest technical choice is how Chernov intercuts his own footage with Russian state broadcasts calling it staged. He shows the strike on the maternity hospital, then shows the propaganda machine denying the strike on the maternity hospital. The sound design lets long stretches of dread sit in near silence before the next shell lands.
What separates this from ordinary frontline reporting is that Chernov keeps the camera on the cost of the camera. He shows people begging him to film their dead and other people cursing him for doing it. He refuses to look away and refuses to pretend the looking is clean. The film works less as a piece of cinema than as a piece of testimony, the kind that exists so no one can later claim it did not happen. It is one of the essential records of the war, and it earns that weight frame by frame.