20 Days in Mariupol (2023)

This film was made by Ukranian AP reporters who were on the ground in Mariupol prior to the Russian invasion, and while the rest of the press fled (appropriately so, unfortunately), they stayed, never expecting to be witness to such atrocities that they saw but feeling like they needed to tell the story of what happened in their country. It is therefore about the first 20 days of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and it spares very few sensibilities. It goes on a short list of great documentaries that the viewer will never want to watch again and likely won't need to because some of the stories and the images that accompany them are so gruesome and the context so upsetting that they'll be burned into your memory. Although the movie begins at the end, it quickly transforms into a linear report of what the journalists saw. This movie is culled from approximately 25 hours of material that Chernov's team recorded on-site. The journalists start off being confident that civilian neighborhoods and public buildings will be spared, that notion is quickly abandoned—instead civilians are specifically targeted, and the last thing they chronicle before getting smuggled out of Mariupol is the bombing of a maternity hospital, with pregnant women and their children being killed by Russian bombs. A big part of what makes the movie so fascinating, valuable, and intense is how it lets certain events unfold in what feels like real-time, even though there are edits for the sake of compression and clarity. This is powerful as well as tolerable—it could have been so much bloodier and more gruesome, so while the narrative doesn’t spare us, a lot of the visuals are not the stuff of nightmares. Everyone should watch this.