From the Oscar®-winning team behind 20 DAYS IN MARIUPOL, 2000 METERS TO ANDRIIVKA documents the toll of the Russia-Ukraine war from a personal and devastating vantage point. Following his historic account of the civilian toll in Mariupol, Mstyslav Chernov turns his lens towards Ukrainian soldiers — 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.
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.
DIRECTOR STATEMENT | MSTYSLAV CHERNOV
“I think that war is probably the best time in life to just start everything over from scratch,” Fedya once told me. “And we have such a moment now. We need to keep pushing.”
He was 24. A former warehouse worker with a scar on his lip. Now, a sergeant of the 3rd Assault Brigade. In the forest, walking among the trenches that looked like graves, he was sure Ukraine would win this war.
I doubted his optimism.
It was the summer of 2023. The Ukrainian counteroffensive – the largest military operation in Europe since the Second World War was underway. Everyone had been waiting for it, anticipating victories. But the reality was different.
Ukrainian forces were advancing, but the progress was slow, and the losses were devastating. The frontline was nearly inaccessible to journalists. Entire villages and cities hung in limbo while the country stared at screens, hoping for liberation, longing to see more Ukrainian flags raised against the sky.
The world was watching, too.
Before meeting Fedya and joining his battalion’s mission, I had been straddling two worlds. In one, I was screening “20 Days in Mariupol” across the US and Europe, briefly visiting my daughters and experiencing the normality of life. People were seeing the war from the safety of their screens, discussing it over coffee in their homes and cafes. The other world was Ukraine. I kept coming back to document the war.
It felt like moving between two epochs. One world was comfortable and set in the present. The other looked like something out of Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Hemingway’s dispatches from the Spanish Civil War, or a Paul Nash war painting: cities destroyed by airstrikes, cut-down forests, the roar of artillery, gas, and bullets. Only it seemed even worse now with the realities of modern warfare. Drones dominated the skies, and there was no hiding from them.
Outside Ukraine, the counteroffensive was reported in numbers: casualties, kilometers gained or lost, and days since the beginning of the invasion. On the ground, it was more. Every inch of land was covered in blood, broken bodies, and grieving families. And I wanted to show what those numbers really meant.
That’s when we met Fedya and his unit. They were on a mission to liberate Andriivka, a small village on the outskirts of occupied Bakhmut, just two hours from my hometown, Kharkiv. It was surrounded by minefields and trenches, and the only way to reach it was through a narrow strip of forest.
I remember sitting with him and three of his men in the small room of their dorm near the frontline. We shook hands, we smoked, and I recorded some of the first shots of the film. They had just returned from battle and mourned the death of their friend who had been shot in the head. I looked at the maps and their helmet camera footage. I kept thinking about that tiny, seemingly insignificant forest: the battle through it could symbolize the entire 600-mile frontline and the struggle of the whole Ukrainian army fighting for every inch of the land.
A year later, as I write this and the film is complete, only Fedya remains standing among those four people in the room.
Credit: artdaily
