Best movies of 2023 in the US: No 6 – 20 Days in Mariupol
Mstyslav Chernov’s horrifying eyewitness documentary 20 Days in Mariupol is about Vladimir Putin’s brutal siege of the Ukrainian port city, from February to May 2022, resulting in more than 20,000 deaths. It is effectively the director’s cut: the gruelling unexpurgated text of this Associated Press journalist’s original video reports from within the city for western news outlets. They were, even in their packaged version, gruellingly tough – and Chernov’s images of mass graves did a very great deal, even in edited form, to galvanise western opinion and to subdue dissenting thoughts that supporting Zelenskiy wasn’t worth it and that Nato had provoked the Russians.
But the full material is wrenching: this film is really a broadcast from hell on earth. Chernov shows in unflinching detail the shattered bodies of men, women and children, and even more unbearably shows the agony of loved ones sobbing over the corpses: a blaze of emotional pain almost obscene in its directness. And Chernov and his photographer Evgeniy Maloletka are themselves part of the story. Their subjects are always reacting to their appearance: sometimes they angrily tell the film-makers to go away. But sometimes, and with almost the same kind of despairing rage, they tell them to stay, to record what they are going through, to be a witness to the horror. Ukrainian troops at one stage rescue Chernov and Maloletka from a hospital in which they had been trapped by snipers. Their capture by Russian personnel would undoubtedly have been a counter-propaganda coup for Putin.
Yet perhaps even this is not where Chernov plumbs the lowest depths. The darkest moments come when the film shows Ukrainian civilians, in extremis, effectively turning on each other by looting shops. The proprietors of these small businesses are almost powerless to intervene – although some looters are shamefacedly induced to give up some of their booty by Chernov and his camera. Some are looting for food. Some are just looting. The war has diminished their humanity. This is the complicated picture that the film gives us that won’t go in the nightly TV news.
As we reach the end of the year, 20 Days in Mariupol finds itself in a different geopolitical context. The uprising against Vladimir Putin by Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Group – precisely the kind of internal insurgency that the west was praying for – has failed and Prigozhin was killed in a mysterious plane crash. So the poetic justice of imminent defeat that may have coloured the reception of this film is gone. And then of course there are the horrendous events of 7 October, in which Hamas launched a pogrom against Israeli civilians that led to Israel’s brutal and continuing counter-strike. This too has been welcomed by Putin as a further drain on the west’s attention and
resources.
There is obvious substance in the complaint that the west sympathises with Ukrainians but not Palestinians. But even that symmetry is smudged, or perhaps replaced with the queasy symmetry of my-enemy’s-enemy: Hamas has sided with America’s foe Russia in the matter of its Ukrainian invasion and before the attacks, received financial support through a Moscow-based crypto exchange.
All these matters have affected the reception of 20 Days In Mariupol as the year nears its end. But they certainly don’t diminish its power and its relevance.
In these stories, in an unexpected contrast with the other two films, Jews are the main characters. And the stories keep coming, dozens of them, the effect mesmerising. As with Lanzmann’s Shoah, the length of McQueen’s film is the point: the Holocaust is an event the retelling of which could take till the end of time. All the while, what we actually see on screen is a city of people chatting in cafes; a man practising the guitar in his living room; kids in a school cafeteria; a couple watching TV; a man stroking a cat; the Dutch prime minister on a TV set attached to the wall of a kebab shop, announcing a new lockdown (Covid struck when filming began). The surface is our world; what lies beneath is the Shoah.
The collision of past and present is constantly jarring. A camp for Nazi prisoners is now a retirement home. Where once Dutch Nazi volunteer drivers gathered, today teenagers practise ballet. Where the deportation of Amsterdam’s Jews was organised, now there are kids in backpacks wearing AirPods.
It shows even less than The Zone of Interest; it lets our imagination do the work. It invites us to consider how quickly nature and human progress conspire to cover up the traces of our crimes and how easily they can be forgotten – unless there is a determination to remember, a determination shared by McQueen and Stigter and, to their credit, the makers of One Life and The Zone of Interest.
But there is another unexpectedly hopeful message, too, implicit in all three of these films, but read most clearly in the faces of the people skating and sledging on the Amsterdam ice in Occupied City. It is that even the deepest darkness passes eventually; that an easier era can take its place and that, for all the torments of the present, it is better than that particular past. We are lucky to live now, not then – even if we sometimes struggle to see it.
• One Life is out on 5 January, The Zone of Interest on 2 February and Occupied City on 9 February