20 Days in Mariupol

Mstyslav Chernov's 20 Days in Mariupol won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2024, Ukraine's first ever Oscar. It also won the BAFTA, the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service journalism (shared with Chernov's Associated Press colleagues) and a Sundance audience award. Chernov dedicated the win to the people of Mariupol and said in his acceptance speech that he wished the film had never had to be made.

When Russia's full-scale invasion began in February 2022, Chernov, the photojournalist Evgeniy Maloletka and the producer Vasilisa Stepanenko were the last international press team inside the besieged port city. The film is built almost entirely from their AP wire footage of the three-week siege: children dying after a strike on a maternity hospital, mass graves dug in courtyards, the destruction of the Drama Theatre, residents queueing for water as shells land around them. Chernov narrates in Ukrainian, and his voice-over breaks with the conventions of objective journalism to turn the film into a survivor's testimony.

It works as international war reporting and as personal witness at the same time. Several of its sequences had consequences well beyond the film: the maternity-hospital images shaped the early international response to the invasion. And the film exists only because Chernov and his team smuggled their hard drives past Russian checkpoints, which gives every frame the weight of evidence preserved against the odds.