The first weeks of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine unfolded in a rush: Russian tanks rolling through streets, tens of thousands fleeing, bombs over cities like Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Mariupol.
Mariupol, in particular, became a symbol of the brutality of Russia’s invasion — mostly through the work of a team of Ukrainian journalists from the Associated Press, who were the last international reporters left in the city.
Together, they documented the Russian siege of Mariupol, a city otherwise cut off. Only a sliver of what those reporters captured was published at the time, but what did became some of the defining images of the early days of the Ukraine war — children killed in air strikes and pregnant women, covered in blood, evacuating a bombarded maternity hospital.
Mstyslav Chernov, an AP videographer and member of the Pulitzer Prize-winning team, shot 30 hours of footage in Mariupol before he and his colleagues escaped the area through multiple Russian checkpoints.
The result is the AP and Frontline documentary, 20 Days in Mariupol, which recounts, day by day, the story of a city under relentless bombardment. The film shows Mariupol’s unraveling, the chaos and confusion that consumes people when they’re isolated and trapped. It also shows how Mariupol survived, how its residents — angry, terrified, heartbroken, exhausted — adapted to almost unfathomable horror. In one scene, Chernov asks a worker who is piling bodies in a mass grave, what he is feeling.
“I don’t know what I feel right now,” he says. “What are people supposed to feel in this situation?”
That question is the subtext throughout the film, and is accompanied by one asked explicitly over and over again: Why? The question is a perpetual one, in Ukraine and elsewhere. Nearly two years into war, Russia continues to bombard towns and villages, often far from the front lines. In Israel, Hamas murdered at least 1,200 people in a brazen attack and took scores hostage; since then,…
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