20 Days in Mariupol review – searing film bears terrible witness to brutal siege
There is genuine horror in this eyewitness documentary about Vladimir Putin’s attack on the southern Ukrainian port city of Mariupol; I spent many moments of it with my head in my hands. The brutal siege lasted from February to May 2022; civilian centres were targeted and more than 20,000 people killed. The Ukrainian Associated Press journalist and film-maker Mstyslav Chernov was there for 20 days, and filed video reports that helped to galvanise western opinion, particularly the horrific images of mass graves. But this movie is the uncut, unexpurgated version: the real nightmare, the real explicit obscenity which no TV executive would put on the nightly news.
Chernov shows the dead bodies of men, women, children and babies. But perhaps even more horribly, he shows us, in unthinkable closeup, the wrenching anguish of those left behind, sobbing over the shattered bodies of their loved ones. It really is not to be borne. He also shows us how the indignity and inhumanity of war manifests itself in other ways. Ukrainian civilians in Mariupol began looting: some food shops from sheer want, but also other places out of opportunism. A woman who owned a general store – smashed by the shelling – is shown confronting a man who is walking out of it with goods under his arm, including a child’s football which he is shamed into throwing back. But perhaps the people, in their wretchedness, think that this plunder is a tiny recompense for the nightmare they are going through.
As for the Russian authorities, they brazenly claim it is all fake news. And here is where I had an uneasy memory of Sergei Loznitsa’s 2018 film Donbass, which depicts the Russians confecting fake news; it was taken by many, including me, to be a satirical fantasy. But now Russian authorities believe, or pretend to believe, that the Ukrainians are doing it. This searing film bears a terrible witness to this great crime.
• 20 Days in Mariupol is released on 6 October in UK cinemas.