EXCLUSIVE: One of the most visceral and terrifying depictions of war ever recorded is about to make its way to U.S. theaters.
2000 Meters to Andriivka, director Mstyslav Chernov’s follow up to his Oscar-winning 20 Days in Mariupol, opens in New York (at Film Forum) on July 25 through PBS Distribution. It opens a week later in Los Angeles (at Laemmle Monica), with a national rollout to follow; in December the documentary will make its broadcast premiere on the PBS series Frontline.
The film, documenting the intense, sanguinary attempt by Ukrainian soldiers to retake a village seized by Russian invaders, won Chernov the directing award for World Cinema Documentary at Sundance. It also won the prestigious F:ACT Award at CPH:DOX in Copenhagen; the City of Poznań Freedom Award from Millennium Docs Against Gravity in Poland; Best International Documentary at Doc Aviv in Tel Aviv, and a trio of awards at the DocuDays UA International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival in Chernov’s native Ukraine.
We have your first look at the film in the trailer above.
20 Days in Mariupol focused on Russia’s brutal assault on civilians in the early days of its full-scale invasion in February-March 2022. 2000 Meters to Andriivka, meanwhile, trains a lens on Ukrainian forces – “who they are, where they came from, and the impossible decisions they face in the trenches as they fight for every inch of their land,” as a synopsis notes. “Amid a failing counteroffensive in 2023, Chernov and his AP colleague Alex Babenko follow a Ukrainian brigade battling through approximately one mile of a heavily fortified forest on their mission to liberate the Russian-occupied village of Andriivka. Weaving together original footage, intensive Ukrainian Army bodycam video and powerful moments of reflection, 2000 Meters to Andriivka reveals with haunting intimacy, the farther the soldiers advance through their destroyed homeland, the more they realize that, for them, this war may never end.”
An estimated 400,000 Ukrainian troops have been killed or wounded since Russia launched its unprovoked attack, according to the Washington, DC-based Center for Strategic and International Studies. The center estimates the number of Russian troops killed or wounded at nearly 1 million.
Chernov spoke with Deadline’s Doc Talk podcast in March, sharing some of what he learned from Ukrainian soldiers on the frontline.
“Everyone is incredibly tired, traumatized, exhausted,” he told us. “They pool all the forces into standing their ground. But when you talk to them, when you talk about their motivation, about their vision of ending this war, you’ll always get the same answer: ‘I want to make sure that my children will not fight this war.’”
Among his many awards, Chernov has won the Oscar, the DGA Award, and the 2023 Pulitzer Prize (shared with his AP colleagues Evgeniy Maloletka, Vasilisa Stepanenko, and Lori Hinnant). Before Russia’s full-scale invasion, he covered the war in Donbas, as well as the Maidan Revolution (Revolution of Dignity) in Ukraine, the downing of flight MH17, Syria’s civil war, and the Battle of Mosul in Iraq.
Despite enduring grave threats to his life making 20 Days and Mariupol and 2000 Meters to Andriivka, Chernov is continuing to document the war in Ukraine.
“We’ve recently started shooting another film near the frontline,” he told us. “We realized that we can’t [approach it the way] we have done a year ago because the warfare itself has changed. It’s much more roboticized, it’s much more inhuman and the weapons even more precise. And it’s all about drones now. [Drones were] important back then in 2023, but right now we mostly see drone fighting and people just following these drone strikes and crawling and hiding from these all-seeing eyes of death that are watching us from the sky, the mechanical death we’ve invented.”
2000 Meters to Andriivka is directed by Mstyslav Chernov, who also serves as the film’s cinematographer. Producers are Mstyslav Chernov, Michelle Mizner, and Raney Aronson-Rath; co-producer is Alex Babenko, who also supplied additional cinematography. Michelle Mizner edited the film. The score is composed by Sam Slater.
Watch the 2000 Meters to Andriivka trailer above.
The post ‘2000 Meters To Andriivka’ Trailer: Devastating, Intimate Depiction Of Ukraine War From Oscar Winner Mstyslav Chernov appeared first on Deadline.
