'I want people to remember how close it is': Oscar-winning Ukrainian filmmaker on new documentary

ITV News

5 days ago

Two thousand meters; it isn't very far.
A short stroll; no more than that.
But in Ukraine, as film-maker Mstyslav Chernov tells me: 'Every meter of land is someone's life and someone's blood.''
His new documentary, 2000 Meters to Andriivka, is raw reportage from the front line of a single battle; harrowing, heart-breaking and often very hard to watch.
The fight is through a narrow strip of woodland to recapture a village seized by the invading Russians.
Chernov walked every step of the way with Ukraine's Third Assault Brigade. He returned alive. Many more did not.
"My main goal was to keep the memory of those people - and to honour them and their names,'' he says. ''To express the strength of Ukrainian soldiers who are protecting the land that I call home.''
Almost every soldier we meet along the way is ultimately doomed. There are no Hollywood heroes; just men, filled with fear, doing their duty.
And yet Hollywood has already honoured Chernov for his previous film, 20 Days in Mariupol.
In his Oscar's acceptance speech last year, he said he would gladly swap the award for a Russian retreat from Ukraine.
It can't be easy to inhabit such different worlds; to tread the red carpet one moment and then to cower in a muddy trench.
"It is a paradox,'' he says. "The existence of those red carpets in normal life… and then you travel across a couple thousands of kilometres and you just cross the border, take a train, take a car, and you are back in time 100 years.
"Or sometimes it feels like another planet. It's so different.
"But if you turn on the Russian television, they will keep saying that it takes only 20 minutes for a Russian nuclear bomb hit London, or it will take only 24 hours for Russian tanks to reach Berlin.
"I just want people to remember how close it is and how real it is."
It is, he says a film, about distance and how deceptive that can be; the length of the woods becomes a chasm the solders must bridge; the thousands of miles between the front line where so many sacrifice their lives and the political leaders making the actual decisions likely to decide Ukraine's fate.
As we speak, America seems to be losing faith that Vladimir Putin will agree a ceasefire.
I ask him if he'd like to screen the film for President Trump.
"I would love to screen this film for the political establishment in US,'' he replies. "Just to pierce the bubble. The political bubble, abstract bubble, and just bring a little bit of reality.
"There is so much false information that reaches the ears of politicians who are making big decisions. I'd love them to see things how they really are.''
2000 Meters to Ardriivka brings the grim reality far too close for comfortable viewing.
In the end, the soldiers achieve their objective but it's a costly and fleeting victory. The Russians soon return.
No film, I have seen, captures so well the futility of war – nor, its absolute necessity for those defending their homeland.
2000 Meters To Andriivka is in cinemas from Friday.