2000 Meters to Andriivka

Mstyslav Chernov won the Academy Award for 20 Days in Mariupol, the first Oscar in Ukrainian history. His follow-up took the directing prize in the World Cinema Documentary competition at Sundance in 2025, screened at Cannes, and was shortlisted for the documentary Oscar the following year. It was co-produced by the Associated Press, for whom Chernov works, and PBS Frontline.

The operation is small in the scheme of the war and appalling in its arithmetic: a platoon must advance two thousand metres along a single strip of woodland to reach the ruins of Andriivka, near Bakhmut. The trees are the only cover for kilometres. Chernov and his cameraman go in with the soldiers and stay, and the film is assembled from their body-camera and helmet-camera footage, drone imagery from above the treeline, and Chernov's own narration, which is quiet, first-person and unsparing about what filming this costs the person doing it.

It is a harder watch than 20 Days in Mariupol, and structurally more ambitious: the drone shots turn the strip of forest into a map, so that the viewer always knows exactly how far the soldiers have got and how much is left. Reviewers described it as the most physically immediate war documentary since Restrepo. Chernov's argument, made explicitly, is about the ratio between the ground gained and the names of the men who gained it.