Following the global acclaim of 20 Days in Mariupol, which earned him both an Academy Award and a Pulitzer Prize, Ukrainian filmmaker and journalist Mstyslav Chernov returns to the frontline with 2000 Meters to Andriivka, a stark, immersive chronicle of modern warfare from the trenches of eastern Ukraine.
Premiering at Sundance, the documentary shifts focus from civilian suffering to the raw, unfiltered experience of Ukrainian soldiers, embedding viewers directly into a harrowing military campaign.
Shot alongside longtime collaborator Alex Babenko, 2000 Meters to Andriivka combines helmet-mounted GoPro footage, drone surveillance, and observational camerawork to reconstruct the gradual and grueling advance of a Ukrainian platoon toward the shattered village of Andriivka. Yet the film’s visceral realism is matched by its narrative precision: Across its tight structure, Chernov deftly weaves battlefield immediacy with existential reflection, while never losing sight of the men behind the call signs, young soldiers who crack jokes between missions, remember fallen comrades, and carry the unbearable weight of survival.
In conversation with Screen Anarchy, Chernov reflects on the ethical and storytelling challenges of filming so close to death, the influence of video game aesthetics on audience perception, and the quiet philosophy of trust and memory that underpins both the film’s method and its message. Speaking from Karlovy Vary, where the film continued its festival run, Chernov shares the tactical, emotional, and cinematic decisions behind crafting a documentary that unfolds as much in the edit room as it does in the mud-soaked forests of Donetsk.
When you're embedded directly into the platoon, were there any narrative or ethical challenges you faced, filming so close and so intensely?
Mstyslav Chernov: The main narrative challenge is always survival. That’s the challenge.
And then, since the whole point of view in this film is to bring the audience inside the experience of each of the soldiers, not to observe, but actually to experience it, the GoPro cameras help with that. Very simple conversations help with that. But also, it wouldn’t be possible to achieve that without actually walking with them the way they do.
Of course, when you're that close to the enemy, when you're that close to death, they keep asking you, “Hey, but why don’t you have a weapon?” And I would say, “Because it’s dangerous, hey, the Russians could be here.” And so you have to keep explaining to them: “I’m a journalist. I’m a filmmaker. I’m a cameraman. I can’t have a weapon.”
This is a different ethics. That doesn’t mean I don’t feel you, it doesn’t mean I don’t see your point. But that’s just what it is. And actually, we see that moment in the film. The protagonist is joking with us, his first question is, “Where are your guns?” And we know that’s a joke, but also not a joke, because that’s the question every single man in Ukraine is asking himself right now.
So yeah, I would say that’s the challenge. Otherwise, we were quite free to use the material shot throughout the year. We didn’t face, I would say, any strict restrictions on what we could or couldn’t use.
And again, another challenge was how to adequately reflect the way soldiers remember this. That’s actually a very interesting task, because we’re using the medium of GoPros, which make up around 30% of the film. So what are GoPros if you translate them into cinema language? The body cam footage is the direct experience of the person through whose body cam we’re watching.
Therefore, when you’re editing, you have to be true to the experience, and the memory, of the person whose camera you’re using. While editing those scenes, we were also talking to the soldiers who wore those body cams, those who survived. And we wanted what we show to correspond to what they remember, because it becomes a symbol of their memory.
I’ll just return to the first part of your answer. Did you have any kind of backup scenario? Was there an agreement with the soldiers on how to take cover or escape?
Once you step into the forest, there is no way back. That’s the general rule. So you have to go for it. But of course, things happen. Before going in, you go through very specific, practical security briefings: Where is the extraction point if there’s an injury? Where are you going, exactly?
For example, if you're the only one left alive after a bomb hits the group, what distance should you keep between each member when you're walking? Even though you’re the cameraman, whether you’re in front, in the back, or on the side, there are very specific rules about where you can step and what distance you need to keep between people.
Also, there are land mines everywhere. So you have to orient yourself in space. You need to be aware of the land mines around you. You need to know all the extraction points and all the medical protocols. Of course, you also need medical training and a first aid kit. And that’s pretty much it. Then, you’re at the mercy of the people who are taking you there, and your own sense of intuition.
Alex Babenko with Mstyslav Chernov
Weren’t you afraid that maybe this videogame culture and its aesthetics would dampen the emotional effect of your visual language?
We were very much aware of that effect, thanks to this culture. And especially because this isn’t something new that just appeared. This is something we keep seeing, on YouTube, on Telegram channels. Body cam footage is something that brigades or platoons or individual soldiers record regularly, for battlefield analysis, for their own media.
So it’s already a familiar medium. And what’s happening with that familiar medium? It’s already desensitized. People scroll through social media and see this, and for many, it already feels like a game. Because many people are gamers. They're used to violence in games. They're used to violence on social media.
So we actually thought a lot about how to overcome that effect. While we were editing, we were constantly aware of that problem. We noticed that if we cut too fast, if the scene is built from too many cuts, the audience does start to feel it’s a game. They feel detached.
And then… it loses something. The film loses its connection to people, and that would be catastrophic for us, if that happened. But the same thing happens in reverse: if we cut too slowly, or if we didn’t cut at all and just left it as it is, then eventually people get tired of that perspective and detach anyway.
It wouldn’t feel like a game anymore, but they’d still detach, just because they’re getting weary of that viewpoint. So for each scene, we carefully crafted it. Besides the fact that we’re crafting an actual memory of a real person, we also carefully shaped each scene and timed it in a way that would feel very connected, very personalized, but not too slow.
Each scene needed to have its own small story. That was one key thing. And the second thing, maybe even more important, was what happens between those scenes. It was absolutely necessary to show the faces of these people. It was absolutely necessary to talk to the soldiers, to create that personal connection with them.
So that when we go back to the medium of the body cams, the audience already knows who’s wearing it. They’re already connected to each individual going through that battlefield.
Since you were on the battlefield with the cinematographer Alex Babenko, was there any kind of preparation or training related to journalism on the battlefield?
Alex is a friend. He’s also a photographer, additional camera, and co-producer of this film. And it’s actually quite important to have someone next to you who you trust. That’s probably the key to survival. You can’t survive in a war zone alone.
And that actually applies to a wider philosophy, what’s happening right now in Ukraine. I’ll come back to your question, but just to say: what Ukraine is going through right now, especially as it's losing some of the support from the West that it had at the beginning of the full-scale invasion.
I’m getting a lot of questions here in Karlovy Vary, questions about how we feel about it, how Ukrainians feel, how Fedya, the protagonist of the film, feels about it. And I keep answering: from the very beginning of this invasion in 2014 until now, we’ve learned. I’ve learned as a documentary filmmaker. Soldiers have learned. Civilians have learned.
The only person you can rely on for your survival is the one right next to you. And if you don’t trust that person, if you don’t trust your community, your family, your friends, you don’t survive. You can’t survive alone.
And yes, of course, we go through security training. We have medical training. But more important than that is tuning yourselves in, together. Acting as one. Understanding each other without even speaking. That applies to shooting, too. When you need to film something, and the people around you understand you, it’s enough to just give a look, or say one word, and that moment will be filmed.
But when you’re there, you don’t think about filmmaking that much. You think about getting through the experience, and recording as much as you can with the people you’re with. And then, when you come out with all that material, that’s when you start thinking about crafting.
You were on the front line, but also behind the scenes in the drone control center. What was the schedule like?
We came in when the operation to liberate Andriivka was already underway, somewhere in the middle. A few months had already passed. So we started by looking at the body cam footage that had already been recorded by the platoon and meeting the platoon in person. They were rotating at that time, and our protagonists had just come off the battlefield. They were grieving the loss of one of their members.
That’s actually how the entire film began. We sat with them, watched the footage together, looked at the map, filmed them in those moments. And unfortunately, of the five people who were sitting in that room that day, only one, our protagonist Fedya, is still fighting. One of them is seriously injured and can’t fight anymore. The rest are dead.
So that moment, when we first met all of them, when we watched the footage they had filmed, it feels incredibly sad now. But that’s how it started. At that point, we decided we would embed with them and follow them into the final stages of the mission, when they would carry the flag to liberate the village. If, of course, it happened. Nothing was certain. That’s what we hoped would happen.
Our job was simply to stay as long as possible, every day, and keep following the operation. Sometimes we followed it from the perspective of headquarters. Sometimes we filmed the injured being brought in from the battlefield, working with medics. And sometimes we were at the front, depending on the phase of the operation.
For the last 600 meters, we were inside the bunker with headquarters. Then, on the final day, the day the village was liberated, we went to the battlefield with Fedya. He was the one carrying the flag. You think strategically about when you need to be there to tell the story.
So how much time did you spend on the battlefield versus off the front lines?
Much less of what we filmed made it into the final film. And that applies not only to this platoon. At the beginning of the summer, we started following several platoons. This is just the one that happened to finish their mission, so there was a film.
But dozens and dozens of hours were filmed on battlefields with other soldiers. And that footage has never left our laptops, our computers, or our hard drives. Even though the risks to capture it were immense. For this specific platoon, we followed them into battle for several days. But when it comes to the battlefield, you have to be very strategic about the risks you take.
If you take the same risk every day, and the days start to repeat, you see how they’re moving meter by meter toward the goal. So you have to think carefully: When is it worth risking the most? When is it worth stepping onto the battlefield?
The main footage, the core of the film, was shot on the day Fedya carried the flag. So in the film’s structure, you see two timelines merging. One is a single day: the day Fedya carries the flag. The other spans three months, told through GoPro footage, drone footage, and scenes inside headquarters.
These timelines merge in the end, right inside the village, in the same basement, in a single moment. It’s a bit of a Dunkirk structure, if that makes sense. That was actually one of our references. So yes, we filmed much more than what’s in the final cut. And we followed our protagonists for almost a year, sometimes returning to them with their families, and, sadly, sometimes for their funerals.
How was this experience, for you both professionally and personally, different from 20 Days in Mariupol?
20 Days in Mariupol initially began as a series of news dispatches. It was filmed that way, especially in the beginning. But by day 10, I already started to realize it was probably going to become a film. Still, my mindset was focused on getting those news dispatches out. That was incredibly important at the time, sending them out to the world as fast as possible.
This time, we approached the story very differently. It was conceived as a film from the very beginning, and it was shot as a film. The theme is also different. It’s less about journalism, and more about memory and struggle. The memory of the soldiers. The memory of places. The symbolic hope that Andriivka represents. So it’s very different.
Although we did want to preserve something of the DNA of 20 Days in Mariupol, we wanted to keep that sense of continuity in storytelling. But 2000 Meters to Andriivka is a very different story. Thematically, too. It focuses on the experience of civilians who became soldiers, rather than civilians whose lives were destroyed by the invasion.
2000 Meters to Andriivka opens in New York on July 25 through PBS Distribution.
Photos courtesy of Karlovy Vary Film Servis.