SCARS OF WAR
NOTHING brings to life the horrors of war more than the personal stories of those who survived it.
Every second of this harrowing and intense hour-long documentary tells a different tale of grief, fear, bravery and determination, as described and filmed by former residents of Mariupol.
Before the war in Ukraine, this was a bustling city and home to 430,000 residents.
But in little under three months, it became one of the worst hit.
It’s believed over 25,000 have since been killed by Putin’s army.
Just 80,000 people remain – the hauntingly derelict rubble of skyrises now the physical symbol of those souls ripped apart by Russia’s brutality.
We hear, at the start, about the former residents’ hopes and dreams before the war – living in a city that once offered such a happy future.
We feel their fear and desperation as Putin’s army begins closing in – the horror made even more palpable by realtime video footage of bombs dropping, bodies lying on the road and cries of fear.
We journey with them as they make split-second decisions over whether to stay or go as the bombs fall around them. For one young mum, she moves to an underground bunker in a steelworks, for another she takes her family to Mariupol’s theatre.
There’s a chilling account, at the very start, of a young boy renacting the sound of a bomb dropping and talking of clambering over dead bodies.
We hear from Olga, whose husband died just two metres away from her after their house was hit.
And hospital anaesthetist Oksana describes, through tears, the moment a wounded pregnant woman called Irina – who we see injured on a stretcher – dies along with her unborn child.
“It’s the most terrifying thing I’ve seen in my life – packing a young woman into a black bag with her baby, who we laid under her breast,” she says.
Those who lived in Mariupol will forever carry the scars of Putin – and this powerful documentary is yet another public record of his atrocities.