After all other International journalists leave, this director stays behind so that the world can bear witness to Russia’s war crimes in Ukraine. A remarkable story of bravery that deeply influenced the framing of this entire podcast series around what it means to bear witness to each other’s stories. It won the Audience Award in the World Cinema Documentary category, and we break down how 20 DAYS IN MARIUPOL by Mstyslav Chernov influenced my journey at Sundance 2023 and bookended Wonder’s journey.
Sundance 2023 Section: World Cinema Documentary Competition
Distribution: Frontline/PBS, Theatrical release on July 14, 2023, Premium Video on Demand on November 22, 2023, Streaming on PBS Frontline on November 21, 2023
From the Sundance website: On the eve of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a team of Ukrainian journalists enter the strategic eastern port city of Mariupol. During the subsequent siege and assault, as bombs fall, inhabitants flee, and access to electricity, food, water, and medicine are severed, the team — the only international journalists left — struggles to cover the war atrocities and to transmit their footage out. Eventually surrounded by Russian soldiers, they shelter in a hospital, unsure of how they’ll escape.
Ukrainian filmmaker and journalist Mstyslav Chernov offers a window into the practices of conflict zone reporters and an unflinching, anguishing account of the 20 days he and colleagues Evgeniy Maloletka and Vasilisa Stepanenko spent covering Mariupol. Their footage, widely disseminated through news media, not only documents the death and destruction — corpses in the streets and mass graves, the bombing of apartment buildings and a maternity ward, doctors despairing children they couldn’t save — but directly refutes Russian misinformation. Seeing so much death, Chernov wonders how capturing any more could make a difference. But residents implore them to let the world bear witness.
Music Credit: spacedust by airtone
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:13.518] Kent Bye: Hello, this is Kent Bye.
[00:00:15.120] Wonder Bright: And I'm Wonder Bright.
[00:00:16.401] Kent Bye: And welcome to Story All The Way Down, where we're continuing our series of looking at the Sundance documentaries from 2023. Today's episode is on 20 Days in Maripol by Mstislav Chernov. It's a part of the World Documentary Competition and actually took home the Audience Award for World Cinema Documentary and will be distributed by Frontline and PBS. So this is about the 20 days in Maripol that this AP reporter spent as the Russian invasion of Ukraine started on February 24th, 2022. He says that war starts with silence and you kind of see the practices of these wartime journalists that are going there trying to document what's happening. putting their lives on line to get what's actually happening in these images out into the world. There's a certain point where all the other international journalists leave, and it's basically he and his two other colleagues that are there from the Associated Press that are covering what's happening in Mariupol, some of the only images that we see from the war crimes that were being committed by Russia during that time. And so it's such a compelling journey that you're taking on day by day, not every single day, but basically the highlights over this 20 day period. And I was struck by the couple of things. One is just the soundscapes that you have by listening to all the different sounds of war and all the different meanings of the different sounds and how they're reacting, but also just the courage that it took for him to stay there and continue to bear witness to everything that was happening. I'm just going to read this last part of the synopsis because I think it gives a really good overview of some of the different things that are covered in this film. Ukrainian filmmaker and journalist, Mstislav Chernov, offers a window into the practices of conflict zone reporters in an unflinching, anguishing account of the 20 days he and colleagues, Evgeny Molodetka and Vasilisa Stepanenko, spent covering Mariupol. Their footage, widely disseminated through news media, not only documents the death and destruction, corpses in the streets and mass graves, the bombing of apartment buildings and a maternity ward, Doctors despairing children they couldn't save, but directly refutes Russian misinformation. Seeing so much death, Chernoff wonders how capturing any more could make a difference. But residents implore them to let the world bear witness. So yeah, this was one of the early films that I saw and that commitment to keep shooting, to keep bearing witness, to tell these stories was something that really resonated to me just to bear witness to this film, but also all the other stories that are watched after this, the 40 plus films I ended up watching at Sundance 2023. So yeah, I was really moved by this and also like it's hard to watch, but there's a moment where Mrs. Love says it must be hard to watch. So yeah, I'd love to hear some of your initial takes of 20 days in Maripol.
[00:03:19.385] Wonder Bright: Well, initially, like, as you just said, this was one of the first films that was released. So it was one of the first ones you were going to watch. And when I sort of like fell into this rabbit hole of watching these films with you, I did not have any idea I was going to watch as many films as I watched. I had this whole planned for my week. And so when you first started, the first few days, you would say, Well, these are what's been released today. And like, which ones do you want to see? And I did not get anywhere near as far as you got with the films. So initially, I was like, Okay, well, I just I'm going to see the ones only the ones that I really want to see. And this I knew for a fact was not one of the ones that I wanted to see, because I didn't think I could handle it. And, you know, like I get a newsletter from The Guardian every day and I'll go and like look at different articles that they're having. And I never read any of the ones about the war in Ukraine because I just feel so overwhelmed. Like, what am I going to do about it? And it feels so far away. And I just feel hopeless and scared. Honestly, I feel scared because the Cold War is over. It's not cold anymore. And the threats that Ukraine is under, these are global threats. This is a really big problem. And so, you know, I had a true head in the sand kind of moment and I just was like, no, I can't do it. I don't have the bandwidth for that. And then over the course of the week, my capacity for being with stories that might be difficult, but were ultimately so compelling, and I wouldn't want to not have seen them, took over me. I realized I was pretty softened up by the time you said, oh, 20 Days in Maripol has been released again. So if you want to watch it, you have another chance. And you had talked about how meaningful this film was to you. So I knew that I needed to watch it. And I am so glad I did. I'm so, so, so glad I did. I'm so glad that I have these stories inside me and that it's real. and that I have faces and voices to put to those headlines now. They don't feel like headlines, you know. After I watched this the next morning, I got my Guardian newsletter and I clicked first on the stories from Ukraine and that has continued all week. I'm in it now. I'm invested. I want to know what happens and I don't know what I'll be able to do. You know, but I can, I can witness, I can take this story on as a part of my life.
[00:06:21.028] Kent Bye: Yeah, you know, there's so many different twists and turns as the journey that this filmmaker goes on, but I think the thing that I keep coming back to is just the different things that he feels like he needs to bear witness to and share out to the world in a way that there's this historic moment that he has to just share what's happening in his country. And I was really struck by that over time. As electricity goes out, as the internet goes out, as the cell phone reception goes out, he's got a satellite phone. But even just to recharge all of his gear and everything, I mean, he's trying to keep documenting what is happening and sending these dispatches out to the world. And there's these gaps where they're completely cut off from the outside world. And pretty much nobody can know what's happening in these regions. And so, you know, he gets these moments where he's able to get those dispatches out. And then eventually, you know, it's 20 days in Maripol and after 20 days, his whole team leaves. And I think it was around like 86 days that Maripol fell, but you know, he was in those, a number of those days where he was, he and his team are reporting on these war crimes that otherwise we would know nothing about. And so there's this part where he and his team are bearing witness to these. But then at the same time, after he leaves, there's all these other stories that he can't cover. And so he also has a family and also has children. So he's being faced in these situations where he's literally looking death in the face of getting into the red zone. And it is such an intense first-person narrative that he had to go through, but yet that commitment to document all these stories and share them out into the world. And with the hope that if people were able to see what was happening and see these stories, that they would be able to do other things to make this stop. Obviously, the war has continued to go on and it hasn't stopped. But I don't know, there's something about the harrowing images and what's it mean to see these images. And I think it's just in this deeper context of just trying to witness the plight that these families are going through, becoming refugees, losing their families, losing their homes. Yeah, it's a hard film to see those images, but there is this quality of at least hearing the story and bearing witness to it that does have this odd restorative element to it, just to know for us to articulate that these horrors and these human rights violations are happening. So yeah, it's certainly not everybody's cup of tea to be able to have that capacity to bear witness. But I don't know. I just hope that people are able to see what's happening because I think that's the thing I kept coming back to is that there's many of these films that are hard to watch. But again, he comes back to they must be hard to watch because there's these deeper injustices that we can bear witness to the stories and by bearing witness to them, maybe they help shift what's actually happening.
[00:09:27.270] Wonder Bright: The cruelty is hard to watch. The desperate nature of things is hard to watch. And this is as gripping and riveting a tale as you will ever experience. You are on the edge of your seat the whole way through. And you're just rooting as hard as you can for the protagonists. Like that's the craft of filmmaking. So while all the things that you've just said are true, there's also just this extraordinary human spirit and resilience and dedication, like hard work that we're observing, you know, in the journalists and in the doctors and the soldiers and the citizens that they film and the stories that we hear. It isn't unremittingly grim because we're really following the human spirit. And in that way, it is illuminating and resourceful and exciting and passionate. Ultimately, all the things that you would want to ever drive a story, you know, it's a story that you're going to want to take inside you and make a part of your own.
[00:10:55.699] Kent Bye: Yeah, that's a really good point because there is this resilience of the narrator of this film, Mstislav Chernov, is Ukrainian himself. And so this is his homeland that he's covering. And there's moments when you get to see this broader context of other parts of the conflict that he's covered over the years. And this is the latest iteration. And the people that he meets along the way, there's a number of the different stories that really stick with me. This guy who has lost everything, he's pulling all of his belongings in this cart and he's been walking for three or four hours. And is basically like, well, that's life, but also he's continuing to persevere and try to find shelter and stay with family. So yeah, you're really witnessing people in these moments that their lives are forever changed. And he has to bear witness of those stories. And sometimes people don't want to be involved in that story. And other times they're like, please document everything that is happening here, because the world needs to know what's happening. So yeah, that tension between what's private and what's public, but everything becomes a matter of that the public needs to know what's happening to these people's lives. And the degree to which that some of the things that they're reporting are then being claimed as being misinformation. So you see this whole degree of information warfare that we see in the full context of this documentary, and it becomes this sort of undeniable reality. Maybe AI in three to five years will be able to sort of recreate everything, but to see it play out like that, it becomes a little bit more undeniable, at least for me, to see just how easily these authoritarian states can dismiss evidence that is not sympathetic to their larger goals and is revealing a lot of these deeper war crimes that are happening. And it really takes these journalists and the editorial oversight of something like the AP to be there on site to actually document what's happening so that maybe at some point, some of these war crimes will start to be persecuted. But right now, they're just trying to bear witness to the horrors that are happening.
[00:13:11.839] Wonder Bright: Yeah, it sounds ridiculous for me to say what I'm about to say, given the nature of the war crimes that we see in this film. And one of the most disheartening pieces of this film for me is the level to which it deconstructs the disinformation and propaganda machine. that is being disseminated to the Russian people around what is happening and how they deny the footage that's being shot on the ground by these three journalists and say that these are all actors that are making up stories. You're saying that watching this film feels like proof that this isn't misinformation, that they were reporting what was actually happening. To me, I never had the idea that it was going to be misinformation. To me, it's an extremely credible source. And I feel like there is just a culture of distrust about the press at this point, where things can literally happen right in front of people and they don't believe it. They don't believe it. You know, and I think that's part of the human condition that we don't believe the evidence of our eyes, but the lack of trust that we have in the press. And this has been like a recurring theme in our conversations this week because of the film Bad Press and also because of Victim Suspect, which And then this is the third film in the trilogy of films that have journalists at the heart of it. And these people are working so hard to faithfully report what they are seeing, what they're experiencing, and the stories that they're getting. And there is no guarantee that they are going to be trusted on the other side of it. And, you know, in the United States, we're having events occur and there's no agreement that they occurred. And this idea that there are actors performing these atrocities so that people will turn on people in power is astounding to me. So I have a lot of grief over the way in which we've lost connection with our capacity to trust the press. The three stories that we've seen this week that I just talked about really speak to what a loss that is. Because these first-person stories of journalists reporting the truth of what's occurring are the very way in which we as a people might be able to bear witness to these stories. It makes a lot of sense to me that this is the final film that we're talking about, that it's the final film that we saw. It's literally in the synopsis that you read this plea for us to bear witness. That's how they end the synopsis. And this is how we started this project. This is what we want to do. This is the element that makes like healing from individual strife possible. It only happens through the collective. There's only so much an individual can do. It's only when the collective can come together and create avenues to healing that it's possible. And bearing witness to somebody's story, to the experiences that people go through, is the prime method that we have to create that collective agreement and that collective will to act. So the amount of distrust that people feel for the press right now is one of the most dangerous things that we're confronting as a species. And for me, this film, as much as it's about the atrocities of war that are being committed in Ukraine right now, and the inherent danger globally, that that implies, because Russia isn't going to stop at Ukraine. That's not the end of Putin's vision. This is just the beginning. So this story is essential, and that part of the story is also essential, that bit about the misinformation.
[00:17:52.410] Kent Bye: Yeah, it's such a key part that I think speaks to that larger polarization that we spoke about a little bit in The Cult of the End of the World, this dual filter bubbles of reality, you know, what is truth? What is reality? So yeah, I love how you're articulating all that and reflecting on, you know, how this was a real inspiration to me, this film in particular, and that like, I felt that call to like, this is really important. Like, just watching and digesting and internalizing and communicating about spreading the word, sharing this is what I saw, bearing witness, making sense of it. And yeah, it carried me through the thrust of that. I kept hearing Mstislav Cherenov's like, you know, he's saying different things throughout this film, one of which he says he desperately wants to forget all of this. but the camera will not let it happen. So he's letting the camera direct his attention. There's something about the intensity of what he's watching that he wants to just escape or look away or return back to his family. There's still yet something that's compelling him to continue to bear witness to everything and to capture the footage and to find a way to get it out into the world. Yeah, it's definitely a story that I'm not going to forget. I think it kicked off a whole journey for me. And I think the way that you articulated all that is really on the nose in terms of what's at stake for, you know, when it comes to bearing witness to stories and people as they are sharing their own first person experiences, I think documentary as a medium allows us to do that. Maybe sometimes more than what the press may or may not get right as a reporting art on this or that. But I think there is this general distrust of the press. That's like a whole other whole other film and documentary that reminds me of like Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent, but also like what the press does and does not cover. And it's not like everything that makes it to print is absolutely true. And so there is this discernment that you have to have and different perspectives and the way things are framed sometimes and the political framing versus the economic framing. But I think one of the reasons why I love the documentary is that it just is able to capture this anthropological and oral history and document in a way that you can. bear witness to. Obviously, there's always going to be editing decisions. And we talked about this in terms of Susan Sontag on photography, the context of Fantastic Machine, the ability to say no and to discern what is and is not shown. So obviously, all of that's still in the play, but all that into consideration. There's something about the way that all these stories have come together and are woven together through all the different ways that we're making sense of it through this sense-making process of talking about it. It's been quite a journey to share all these films with you, but also to see how we're like weaving our own stories into them. And they become these points of reference to talk about these deeper archetypal patterns that are referenced in our lives. You know, the courage that Mrs. Love turned off and the rest of the team showed throughout this is certainly one thing that I'll be remembering and bearing witness to throughout the course of this. So I guess that's my answer to what I'm bearing witness to is the courage that the filmmaker showed and to be so relentless and dedicated towards wanting to, on the one hand, to forget it all, but on the other hand, listening to that other part of the camera will not let it happen. And that deeper compulsion that they had to keep going and to keep filming and to keep trying to get these stories out there. So what are you bearing witness to in this film?
[00:21:32.417] Wonder Bright: I'm bearing witness to the police officer that they spoke to, Vladimir, who insisted that they record him and he speaks directly into the camera and he makes a plea for the world to see that this is happening in his country and that it's not right and that they need help. And I will think about him every time I see a headline in Ukraine. Every time I read one of those stories, I will think about him and carry him with me. I'll be reading those stories because he asked me to. I'll be sharing about this film because he made that plea.
[00:22:25.383] Kent Bye: Yeah. Yeah, so this was 20 Days in Maripol by Mstislav Chernov. It was part of the World Documentary Competition at Sundance 2023, took home the Audience Award in World Cinema Documentary, and also will be distributed on Frontline PBS. And yeah, thanks again for joining us for Story All the Way Down. To get more information about this film or podcast, you can visit storyallthewaydown.com. There you'll find some show notes, more information about the podcast and opportunities to support what we're doing. Thanks for joining us.
