Transcript: ‘20 Days in Mariupol’ director Mstyslav Chernov 

This is an audio transcript of the Life and Art from FT Weekend podcast episode: ‘20 Days in Mariupol’ director Mstyslav Chernov 

Lilah Raptopoulos
This is Life and Art from FT Weekend. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos.

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The film 20 Days in Mariupol is an extraordinary documentary that chronicles Russia’s attack on one of Ukraine’s largest cities, which is now destroyed. When full-out war began two years ago this month, a number of journalists started heading to Mariupol, thinking Russia would likely attack it. It was so dangerous that within days, only a small team from the Associated Press was left. The images and video they shot were broadcast across the world in small clips on the news, some of which you may remember, like video of a bombed maternity hospital ward. Mstyslav Chernov was the videographer on that team. When he and his colleagues were eventually smuggled out of the city, he had hours and hours of footage, so he decided to make a feature-length film. His documentary chronicles his 20 days there chronologically, and gives us the larger context of those clips we saw on television. 20 Days in Mariupol is now up for Best Documentary at the Oscars and the Baftas, and Mstyslav is with us in our London studio today. Mstyslav, hi. Welcome to the show.

Mstyslav Chernov
Hi. Thank you for the invitation.

Lilah Raptopoulos
We’re grateful to have you. I want to start by asking you a little bit about yourself, if you don’t mind. You’re a journalist and a videographer. You’ve covered many conflict zones, but you started as a fine arts photographer, and you’ve written a novel that reflects on the experience of war. Is that right?

Mstyslav Chernov
Yeah, yeah. Interesting that we start from there as many other Ukrainian journalists, writers, filmmakers, a war started in Ukraine in 2014, and we all kind of automatically became war correspondents. Each one in our own way. And I remember as a documentary photographer but still as partially as an art photographer, having arguments with my friends who were still fine arts photographers about, at the time when the country is at war, which kind of photography, which kind of art is more valuable? And I felt at that point that I should dedicate myself more to documentary, because that’s what . . . yeah, that’s what the country needed at that point. And that’s what I felt was more relevant.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. OK. So you had been to Syria, you had been to Iraq, you had been to Greece for the migrant crisis. I’d love to hear what it was like going down to Mariupol two years ago. When you first landed there, how long did you think you would stay? How quickly did you realise that it was going to be a siege of the city?

Mstyslav Chernov
Well, actually . . . So I flew to Ukraine in January from Afghanistan, and I was already horrified that after all I’ve seen in Afghanistan, if Russia attacks Ukraine on the big scale, people will just forget about Afghanistan. And then that actually happened. And, we’ve seen the country preparing. We’ve seen Ukraine preparing for possible invasion. Many people didn’t believe that, but many people did. And they were preparing, and I was filming that. And there was this feeling that something is going to start, something inevitable. And we were just thinking, well, if tomorrow Russia attacks, they will go and they will try to occupy Mariupol, and how would that unfold? What we didn’t expect is that we will be the only ones in the city, and that means we didn’t have anonymity, which you do have when there are a lot of journalists reporting on the events, and Russia after the maternity hospital bombing, they claimed that we are information terrorists, that we were staging everything. And it was, again, difficult because it was so painful for people who really suffered, who really lost their lives. And Russia kept saying that this is not true, that they’re just actors.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right, right. Can I ask, I’m curious, what made you decide to stay while other journalists were evacuating?

Mstyslav Chernov
Yeah. So the decision, of course, is not just me deciding. Of course, we have to speak to our editors. Of course it’s a collective decision. But a decision was made and understanding that the city will be surrounded. And the decision was made even before the full-scale invasion. Other journalists decided to leave for various reasons. The main battle was unfolding for Kyiv. And I remember editor telling me, Mstyslav, would you, maybe you should go back to Kyiv. And I said, look, we should stay here. We should stay in Mariupol because it hasn’t started yet for this city. And when it starts, it’s gonna be horrible.

Lilah Raptopoulos
You knew. Yeah. For listeners who haven’t seen the film yet, can you just give a sense of what you saw in those 20 days?

Mstyslav Chernov
So the siege of Mariupol lasted for 86 days. We were there only for 20 days. But in these first 20 days, you can really see how city just sinks into darkness. Russians quickly surrounded it so no one can leave. There were about 300,000 people trapped in the city, and almost immediately, Russians targeted all the infrastructure in the city. So it means the city was left without water supplies, without electricity, and without connection. So beyond the military siege, a city was also besieged — it was an information siege. Nothing get in, nothing get out. People didn’t know what was happening. I remember people asking me if Ukraine still exists as a country. And you know, that information siege was probably the . . . not more devastating, but as devastating as indiscriminate bombardment that killed at least 25,000 people. The information siege led to panic and to collapse of the civil society because people didn’t know what to expect, people didn’t know how long they’re gonna stay besieged, what to do, how to escape and . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
. . . where to go.

Mstyslav Chernov
Yeah, society just collapsed. But that’s tactics. That’s what . . . that was done on purpose. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. I, you know, I felt like this film was poignant for many, many reasons. The clearest, of course, is just that it felt like, you know, you stayed and witnessed something so terrible, seemingly unflinchingly for us, for people to see. But also it felt like it served two purposes, your footage. Like, one, of course, initially was as breaking news, just something urgent to get out of the country as soon as possible. And then the second was as this film, like now it’s something that we can look back on and talk about and ask questions and keep going. I guess I’m wondering if you could talk a little about that first incarnation as dispatches for the AP, to start. People were seeing it in, I think, 10-second increments . . . 

Mstyslav Chernov
Right. Right. Yeah.

Lilah Raptopoulos
. . . on CNN.

Mstyslav Chernov
And that is actually one of the themes of the film. This transformation of the real events into news dispatches, into sometimes false narratives that when you, when we see Russian news, that’s also in the film. So it’s striking to see the real event unfolding, and then to see how it’s transformed and packaged into the small pieces where we feel so much more distant from what is happening. And one of the messages of this film is that Mariupol is much closer to everyone in Europe and UK, in US. It could be any city.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. At that time, you know, some of the images that you shot became iconic, like including that video. Iconic is such a weird word, but it became sort of . . . 

Mstyslav Chernov
. . . symbolic.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Symbolic, including that video at the maternity hospital that I mentioned. What was it like at the time to see them everywhere? Like, did you know they were being broadcast as widely as they were?

Mstyslav Chernov
No, actually, we did not have a capacity to understand the impact of how wide the images were published. But I remember the feeling when I was filming when rescue workers carried Irina. Now we know her name. We know . . . Unfortunately she died and she lost her child. When we saw that image, they were carrying her through the rubble in a bombed-out hospital to the ambulance, it was so striking. It was so . . . I’ve never seen anything like that before, and I’ve seen a lot. So I knew the importance of the moment. I realised, but I didn’t know the immediate impact and actually I, of course I doubted the immediate impact.

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Lilah Raptopoulos
Mstyslav, what about the second sort of incarnation of these videos? I mean, were you filming everything that you were seeing? Like, how much footage did you have? When did you start thinking of this material as a film?

Mstyslav Chernov
That was the breaking point — the maternity hospital bombing was the point where I thought, well, this story is much more symbolic and it’s much bigger than I thought before. You can actually see how the editing style and how the shooting style even, changes throughout the film. It starts more of a news, like news dispatches. And as we go forward, we see how the style of filmmaking and the editing becomes more cinematic, if I can say that. I didn’t think . . . well, I didn’t even think I could, you know, I will survive. So (chuckles) planning a film at that stage would be absurd. But we did escape and I had 30 hours in my hands, 30 hours of footage. Not that much for the documentary, but much more than we’ve published at that point.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, yeah. I know you’ve written a novel about war. And it seems like you’ve thought a lot about how we talk about war and how we process war as a culture. And I’m curious if you could tell me a little about how that translated into the choices that you made with the film.

Mstyslav Chernov
I am also writing a novel now about Mariupol. A very different perspective, different story. The point is that for each theme, for each story, you probably have to pick the most matching medium. And what happened to Mariupol needed a very documentary approach, needed a very realistic approach. I felt that a story has to be told in real time, in a way, to bring the audience into the experience of war, just to feel how is it.

When we experience war through news, it seems very far and these are just pictures. But what I really wanted to do is I wanted to take the audience and bring them inside the city just to show how it really feels to be trapped and to be afraid every minute of the day for your life and to be hungry, to be in pain and to feel joy and hope, sometimes. You know, the variety of . . . complex variety of feelings and emotions. And for that we have a very realistic, very raw visual language that we use in the film to bring the audience right into that story. So, but I think the complex stories, especially like war, they need to be told in different mediums. That’s what shall be done later. Right now, when the war is still unfolding, when the bombs are still falling, we need something immediate. Also, if you think about the collective memory of Ukraine as a country over humanity, as those who survive together on this small planet, we don’t experience our history through news dispatches or through headlines in newspapers. We experience our history through longer forms. So it’s very important to have the history in this form. But the time will come when we need to re-evaluate what to live through and turn to other mediums.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. I’d love to ask also, while we have you and as we’re living through this: is there anything that you’re finding that Ukrainians think is missing from the narrative right now around this war?

Mstyslav Chernov
I think maybe it is, what’s missing from a perspective of people in US or in Europe is that the fact that Russia right now is not at war with Ukraine. They claim, for their internal narrative but also export narratives, that they are at war with US, they are at war with Europe and not with Ukraine. And Ukrainians feel that. Ukrainians feel that they are also fighting right now not only for Ukraine but for all other countries that Russia is claiming that they’re fighting for. And sometimes it’s quite upsetting for Ukrainians that not the lack of the support, but just lack of understanding that Russia is actually right now is at war with, yeah, with US. Basically that’s what they say. And many people decide not to notice that. Many people around the world decide not to notice that. That’s what I see when I speak to Ukrainians.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mstyslav, my last question for you — and we’re really grateful for your time — is just what we should take away?

Mstyslav Chernov
Oh, this . . . that’s a big question. No this is, actually it’s very hard question because, you know, when you keep hearing from people who you’re filming that you have to keep doing this work, you have to keep filming, you have to continue to struggle with them, you feel that you’re obliged to make a difference. You’re obliged to change something. And then you run into a constant frustration of inability to actually stop a war, you know. Or on a smaller scale, you can’t stop a bullet with a camera. You can’t stop catastrophic bleeding by taking a picture of it. So you do feel powerless. So the only hope is a long-lasting impact.

When the world moved on from a war in Ukraine, from Russia’s invasion in Ukraine in 2015, moved on to another important story in Syria, where Russia was bombing Aleppo, into the migration crisis, everyone forgot about Ukraine. So in 2022, when Russia invaded on a bigger scale, everyone was surprised. But actually, it wasn’t a surprise. It’s just probably we didn’t pay enough attention to what was happening. So I really hope that with my attempts to keep the story alive, to keep the memory of everyone who lost their lives, to keep the attention to Ukraine and to what’s going on right now in Ukraine, I will make at least a small difference in people’s minds, because as soon as Ukraine is forgotten, this war is lost.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Mstyslav, thank you for your film. Thank you for your reporting. Thank you for this conversation. We really, really appreciate it.

Mstyslav Chernov
I appreciate that. Thank you. Stay safe.

Lilah Raptopoulos
You, too.

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That’s the show. Thank you for listening to Life and Art from FT Weekend. 20 Days in Mariupol is out now. It’s being screened in a number of theatres ahead of the Academy Awards. You can also watch it online for free in the US on PBS. We’ve put a few links on how to watch it in the show notes. Also in the show notes are discounts for a subscription to the Financial Times and ways to stay in touch with me and with the show, whether that’s by email, on X or on Instagram.

I’m Lilah Raptopoulos and here’s my incredible team. Katya Kumkova is our senior producer. Lulu Smyth is our producer. Our sound engineers are Breen Turner, Katie McMurran and Sam Giovinco, with original music by Metaphor Music. Topher Forhecz is our executive producer and our global head of audio is Cheryl Brumley. Have a lovely week and we’ll find each other again on Friday.

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