“You never know with a documentary,” says Oscar-winning filmmaker Mstyslav Chernov. “You hope that you’ll get there.”
The statement could apply to most any film being captured in real time, but in this case, Chernov means it literally. His new film, 2000 Meters to Andriivka, follows a Ukrainian platoon in 2023 on a wartime mission to liberate a Russian-occupied village. Chernov is embedded with the soldiers as they go forward, inch by inch — the distance is not terribly long, though the process of getting there is meticulous and perilous — and so the question of his movie was less how it would turn out than whether it could be completed at all.
“I knew that we needed to be as realistic as possible, as close as possible to them, to not just to tell their story, but to bring the audiences a bodily experience, a physical experience of being there,” Chernov says from the SCAD Savannah Film Festival, where the film screened in October in conjunction with the Docs to Watch sidebar and panel. “In order to do that properly … I felt that I also needed to spend time with them on the battlefield.”
The Ukrainian-born director and war correspondent shot Andriivka in the same year that his previous movie, 20 Days in Mariupol, was released — and went on to win the Oscar for best documentary. That movie similarly plunged viewers into a war zone alongside Chernov, in that case the titular city as it went under siege, at the dawn of Russia’s committed invasion of Ukraine. “Every time you hear that another city destroyed, another city occupied … the urge to tell their stories, to show their motivation and what that land means to me just grows more and more,” Chernov says. “I just hope that this otherworldly, violent, horrible experience stays within those places in Ukraine and it doesn’t spread like a cancer to the entire world. I am sure that the war is something that no one should ever experience.”
When Chernov set out to make his follow-up, he knew he wanted to intimately follow a particular group on assignment. “Just seeing them fighting and already understanding how hard that fight was, but still seeing them being so surrealistically optimistic, gave me hope,” he says. The director traveled three different platoons in different regions, over the summer and fall. But the Andriivka mission was “the most impressive and symbolic fight,” even in its cinematic qualities, as the group makes their way through a narrow forest. The director needed to put himself in danger to get it right, and credits those in the platoon with saving his life.
“I thought, ‘Well, that’s a perfect story,’” Chernov says of why he did it. “When you have a goal, when you have a very clear path to that goal, all I need is to stay with them for as much as I can — and hope that they will reach the village someday.”
Watch the full SCAD Q&A above. 2000 Meters to Andriivka, which was produced under PBS’s Frontline banner, can now be streamed on PBS and YouTube.
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