2,000 Metres to Andriivka is film-making at its rawest

New Statesman​

a day ago

Ukrainian servicemen walk through a charred forest at the front line a few kilometres from Andriivka. Photo by Mstyslav Chernov/AP
Mstyslav Chernov's last film, 20 Days in Mariupol, won him multiple awards including the Oscar for Best Documentary, as well as a Pulitzer Prize. It remains deeply traumatising to watch, a day-by-day account of the Russian assault on the city and its inhabitants, showing the horrific destruction of life and the injuries suffered by people who can scarcely comprehend what is happening to them.
Chernov was in Mariupol as a journalist, filing footage for news reports whenever he was able to get online. Only afterwards was the material turned into that brilliantly edited feature. He was determined not only to document what he was witnessing but to make it last. 'If you want something to stay in history, to have a persistent impact, then you have to go with a film language,' he has said. If 20 Days in Mariupol was released in summer 2023, at the same time as Barbie and Oppenheimer, it now seems the significant film of that year.
While promoting 20 Days in Mariupol internationally, Chernov was returning to Ukraine to make his new film, 2,000 Metres to Andriivka, which differs from its predecessor in being conceived as a film project from the off, and in showing not civilians being massacred but Ukrainian soldiers fighting in the ultimately unsuccessful counteroffensive in the second year of the war.
Andriivka is, or was, a tiny village of just 74 people, part of Bakhmut region in the Donetsk oblast of eastern Ukraine, captured by Russia in 2022. Retaking it became a key Ukrainian objective. The only route left to the village was a narrow, 2,000-metre strip of forest between heavily mined fields. In September 2023, after three months of deadly close-quarters fighting, the Third Assault Brigade raised the Ukrainian flag in Andriivka, but found practical difficulty in doing so, since the village was entirely destroyed. Then, in 2024, the Russians recaptured whatever remained.
Much as 20 Days in Mariupol was structured by a sequence of days, 2,000 Metres to Andriivka is ordered by measurements of distance achieved towards the village over three months of fighting, an almost thriller-like device that clarifies events without alleviating the tension.
The footage that Chernov has gathered is extraordinary. With drone footage providing overviews, much of the filming is by the director himself and his colleagues, boldly going out right alongside the soldiers. But about a third of the film is directly from the GoPro bodycams (in fact, mainly helmet-cams) that the soldiers wear in the field anyway for later analysis, giving a 360-degree field of vision in astonishingly sharp detail, which can then be re-framed. We see what they see, or at least what they are in the middle of, in an unprecedented way. It's the most immersive filming possible. Alex Garland effectively adapted this technique for his remarkable combat film Warfare earlier this year, made in collaboration with the Iraq War veteran, Ray Mendoza. But that was a dramatisation. This is real.
What's confounding about what we see is that, despite the use of screens and drones, so much of the actual fighting – taking place in foxholes, using grenades, mortars and machine guns – could as well be the First World War. The burned earth and blasted tree stumps look like Paul Nash's hellscapes. It could be Verdun. But we are seeing it as has not been possible before. It is what John Keegan was attempting in The Face of Battle, fully delivered.
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In an opening scene, a young soldier, whom we have just seen joking ('Film how beautiful I am!'), is severely injured, all limbs shattered – and later we see his funeral. But, in his grave voiceover, Chernov comments repeatedly that many others of those we see have also died since being filmed. One 46-year-old volunteer chats about roll-ups vs other cigarettes, needing to make the well at his house deeper, his wife's pleas for him to come back, whatever it takes. 'I haven't done anything yet and here I am on camera,' he says. Five months later, Chernov tells us, he died in hospital from his injuries. In the final scene, at a roll-call, the soldiers all call out 'Present!' to a long list of call signs. They are, we realise, the names of their dead.
In an excellent interview for the podcast Inside the Arthouse, Chernov, originally a stills photographer and novelist, laments that he is making films about war, when what he would like to be filming is cheetahs, pandas, penguins. But it is necessary, he says. 'The war wipes out everything, everything. Nothing survives it. And yet the very thing that survives is a memory. The question is, how do you keep it?' He also admits that his films are painful to watch. 'It is very, very hard to bring people to cinema and step into the warzone and suffer.' Watching these two documentaries back-to-back left me sapped, in a not dissimilar way from first seeing Elem Klimov's Come and See (1985). Yet they are necessary viewing, unlike any other contemporary cinema.
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