20 Days in Mariupol
Horror beyond language
I want to start by making something clear: this is not a review.
After two whole years of senseless oppression, the War in Ukraine now rumbles in our periphery like the thundering of some distant maelstrom.
How many lives have been lost? How many articles have we read; those that detail impossible tragedies, and unbearable atrocities?
Facing a deluge of modern media coverage (as well as countless blind spots), it is so easy to become inured to the suffering of others. We must fight back against this impulse.
I saw 20 Days in Mariupol at my local cinema, where it played to an (almost) empty crowd. As a piece of guerilla documentary-filmmaking, it takes you back to the first pivotal days of this conflict.
Mariupol sat only thirty-five miles from the Russian border. As a frontier boomtown, it once thrived off the production of pig-iron and steel. But, in February of 2022, as Putin amassed his forces on the border, the city suddenly found itself on a knife-edge. Days later, the bombs would begin to fall.
At this crucial time, acclaimed filmmaker Mstyslav Chernov took a small camera crew into the petrified town, capturing real horror, real trauma, and real loss. The people he interviews are filmed in extremis; real people with parents and children, with pets and property; people with a thousand things to cherish, and therefore also to lose.
20 Days in Mariupol depicts real scenes of appalling and visceral violence. I would once have been very squeamish about this fact, perhaps even morally opposed to it.
To an extent, I am still troubled by this dilemma. Surely one’s final moments are among the most sacred and intimate? Part of me still feels that reproducing these images, even for a humanitarian cause, in some way violates this insular profundity.
However, we must also recognize these horrors as a fact of life. When a civilian population is shelled indiscriminately, extreme suffering is the unavoidable consequence. Editing around this fact would only serve to sanitize the true consequences of Vladimir Putin’s war crimes.
I also believe (somewhat ironically for a habitual writer) that a single image can often be more evocative than any combination of words. For me, film and photography both exert a powerful sense of immediacy. One can describe a face using adjectives such as “aged,” “weathered,” or “wizened,” but until I see it for myself, I can’t quite place it within the context of real life.
Sometimes words feel almost mythical. They are constructs that we can recycle to evoke a thousand different feelings and experiences.
But they are also abstract.
I can say: “war is hell.”
But what does that really mean, from the mouth of a British boy without the faintest idea of what it feels like to live in a warzone? And what connotations could “hell” possibly have, for someone who has never believed in an afterlife?
I won’t go as far as to quote Good Will Hunting, but it is the difference between “savoir” (French for “to know” theoretically) and “connaître” (French for “to know” personally).
Words are often used as a disguise for ignorance.
20 Days in Mariupol helped me to shed (a very small number of) my Western European abstractions. No words can claim to capture the awful echoing of shells in the night, or the agony of a parent that has lost their child. The true experiences of “grief,” and “terror,” and “hatred” can never be contained by these tiny words.
It is for this reason that filmmakers and photographers play such a pivotal role in documenting the human cost of any large-scale tragedy. Although it may be deeply difficult to experience, Mstyslav Chernov’s footage represents an act of phenomenal bravery, and a true commitment to the people of Ukraine.
In the present moment, with certain elements in the Republican Party attempting to twist the narrative, and truth seeming so fickle a thing, 20 Days in Mariupol has become an invaluable historical document.
As I wrote at the beginning, this article is not a review. The emotional content of 20 Days in Mariupol is so terrifying, and so raw, that I really can’t find the words to explain its impact upon me.
I cannot do justice to, or pretend to understand, the significance of the suffering it captures.
Nor can I recommend it to everyone. It is truly upsetting, and in several instances I found myself on the brink of tears.
It is a film dedicated to documenting the darkest atrocities of Putin’s War in Ukraine. It is both horrible, and hugely commendable.
But let me finish by saying this: For Tucker Carlson, this should be mandatory viewing.
