War makes “good people better and bad people worse”, says photojournalist and director Mstyslav Chernov.
He was passing on this piece of advice he heard elsewhere as he films the invasion and destruction of the southern Ukrainian city of Mariupol in early 2022.
It is at times an extremely difficult watch as the AP video journalist documents the enormous price paid by civilians as the Russians advance on the city.
Most of the world’s media departed as Putin’s army reached the outskirts of the city but Chernov stayed and tours the metropolis with his camera for 20 days.
We see the fear, the bombs, the desperate doctors, the looting and much, much injury and death.
We can hear the front lines on the outskirts of the city, but Chernov’s film focuses on the civilians and not the soldiers. In fact, we never see a Russian soldier in the feature length film, just tanks, with the infamous ‘Z’ on the side, on his last day in the city and the crack of a sniper’s rifle.
Mariupol, on the Sea of Azov, was always going to be one of the first targets of Putin.
It sits just 30 miles from the Russian border and directly in the path of efforts to create a land link to Crimea which had been annexed in 2014.
Mariupol was attacked from both sides and was quickly surrounded after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Its defenders must have known they had little chance but hung on for 86 days until the last fighters surrendered at the Azovstal Iron and Steel Works.
Putin had to destroy the city to capture it.
Artillery and war planes pounded the city and as in many other wars, much of the ammunitions were meant for military targets and some of it was indiscriminately directed at civilians.
The film opens and closes with Chernov and a local police officer on the seventh floor of the last working hospital in the city.
The police officer had helped Chernov for days because he felt it essential that the AP video and pictures reach the outside world.
Along with many others they are trapped in the hospital by the presence of a sniper near the front door but then everyone falls silent as, for the first time, they hear the low rumble of tanks in the distance.
Chernov had earlier given us another saying he had heard: “Wars don’t start with explosions, they start with silence.”
To confirm their fears, they head up to the seventh floor and it’s clear – Russian forces are in the centre of the city.
Then one of the tanks backs up in the carpark of the hospital, shunts a bus out of the way and begins firing directly into an apartment block.
It’s shocking as you think of the families in these apartments wondering what they have done to deserve this horror.
Chernov hears this repeatedly from victims and people on the street who struggle to comprehend what is happening.
Chernov first meets the police officer at the aftermath of an incomprehensibly horrible bombing of a maternity hospital.
The Russians later claim it’s “fake news” and that his footage has been staged by actors, but it’s all too real.
One distressing section shows a seriously injured pregnant woman being carried from the wreckage. We hear later that she and her baby died. Another pregnant woman loses a foot, and many others are injured.
More than 25,000 were killed in Mariupol during the 86-day siege and you can’t but think also of the victims in Gaza and Israel, another terrible war and the importance of journalists who risk their lives to document it.
