20 Days in Mariupol (2023)

TV-PG.  I really need to qualify this.  This is the toughest, most raw film that I have ever seen.  I don't understand the TV-PG.  I need to be as clear about this as can be.  This movie needs to be seen.  It is incredibly upsetting.  This is war footage almost uncensored.  People's faces have been blurred.  But this is the mass slaughter of a culture and of a people.  It does not draw lines based on age.  This is a movie that will show you dead children and dead babies, killed from unfathomable violence.  There is language throughout because basic humanity has been stripped from people.  I don't know how it got a TV-PG, but I'm glad it did.  Things that have restrictions on them tend to get fewer viewings.

DIRECTOR: Mstyslav Chernov

If you think that you've seen this movie before, you can thank Vladimir Putin.  Off the top of my head / a little Googling to make sure I get the names right, I am thinking about Last Men in Aleppo and The White Helmets.  There was a time where I thought we were past the age of monsters.  Perhaps it was just that I was a child and my parents hid me from the monsters out there.  But the world has to be teetering closer and closer to a World War.  With the invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin is just following Adolf Hitler's playbook for the inevitable conflict between superpowers.

I'm Ukrainian.  My dad was Mr. Ukraine.  He was so deep into the Ukrainian community that it colored everything we did.  Yet, while growing up, when people saw our name, they kept asking if my name was Russian.  (Once in a while, we'd get Polish.  Never Ukrainian.) Since the invasion started, people now know what the Ukrainian flag looks like.  I hear a lot less of "The Ukraine" and people just acknowledging that "Ukraine" is its own country.  During the events of this documentary, there was footage showing the Western support for the war effort. Any kind of footage able to be extracted from Mariupol was shown to Western audience and I remember this big rise in awareness of the plight of the Ukrainian.  This, by the way, isn't the first time that Russia has pulled this card with Ukraine.  This is the first time that it's reached this outright scale since Putin took office a billion years ago.  But it's happened before.  I remember the love and outcry for Vladimir Zelensky as he fought back against this onslaught against a better funded, better weaponized military.

What I'm about to write is a criticism of humanity, but in a way that can be looked at in many ways.  We live in a tragic world.  We have such an outpouring of news, often tragic, that reminds us that we have to pay attention to this or that.  The current bombing of Gaza is one of those moments.  But 20 Days in Mariupol is a visceral reminder that Ukraine is still fighting this battle.  That criticism of humanity?  It's the idea that we can feel so intensely for a place, but our empathy has a hard time maintaining the long fight.  I'm guilty about the same thing. Ukraine is still important to me because I'm Ukrainian.  The Ukrainians I know and have known me all my life are still waving that flag in the air.  It doesn't minimize the tragedies going around the world right now.  But movies like 20 Days in Mariupol remind us that war isn't just a word.  That's how it feels most of the time.  We know it is a word that carries stigma.  But 20 Days shows us the reality of war, especially a war that comes from Russia.

Based on all of the documentaries I've now watched that Putin would dismiss publicly as libel, Russia fights wars by committing war crimes.  Will I acknowledge that the United States has a wealth of war crimes under its belt?  Sure.  Again, it is easy to throw stones at others because it is easy to see evil when distanced from the subject matter.  But I also know that Vladimir Putin is a specific brand of evil.  This is a documentary that lets you see exactly what level of madness the man has about him.  There is a narrative here that emerges from the filming of the movie.  Because the movie lies in the conceit of its title, we understand that this is a movie about escalation.  Chernov is no stranger to conflict journalism.  That's quickly established.  He shows footage from all of the other atrocities that he's documented in the past.  He has this prescient understanding of what is going to happen to this city.  He's not always right.  If anything, he undersells it a bit.  One of the first things that Chernov does is tell a woman to hide in a basement, claiming that the Russians won't shoot civilians if they don't have to.  

The film then spends the rest of the movie disproving that statement.  Considering that this is a story of war that has a handful of soldiers in it, the movie isn't about a war in any traditional sense.  War is about soldier versus soldier.  While civilian death is always a byproduct of war, 20 Days is something different.  Chernov is hunkered down with people the entire time.  "Hunkered down" isn't the best term because Chernov is always running towards the violence happening in Mariupol.  But when he gets there, very little of it has to do with soliders.  Part of that comes from the notion that the actual Russian forces don't show up until Day 15 or 16.  Instead, as horrific as the violence and the military strikes are, it's never on actual strategic targets.  Instead, it seems like bombs are going for the mass extinction of Ukrainian civilians.  Every strike we see, there are scores of civilian deaths and dismemberments.  I know that there would be military deaths as well.  In no way am I trying to dismiss the military casualities.  I'm more saying that so much of Russia's efforts are there as a form of mass murder on unarmed, non-military targets.

And this is where I turn the onus on the United States. One of the key conceits of the movie is that Chernov shows longer, less cut footage to us.  The cuts seem only to help tell the narrative of escalation in Mariupol.  Then he sends the footage we have just seen to news sources around the world.  We see how that footage is cut into news segments.  The final way that we see those segments is the Russian department of propaganda manipulating those images into something that damns Ukraine, using outright lies of fabrication of tragedy.  Ukraine comes across as the criminal.  Okay. People will argue that all 24-hour news outlets manipulate their viewers into propaganda.  Okay.  I have to make peace that my outlet of choice, CNN, has done the same.  But I'm now going to point the blame on Fox News with its obsession with building up the Donald Trump brand.

Trump recently claimed that he's going to give Russia everything it wants.  No more support of Ukraine.  That guy loves Putin.  Putin thinks he's a joke, but Trump is exactly who Putin wants in the Oval Office.  He's easily manipulated.  I talked about those early days of the war, where American support of Ukraine was almost universal.  (I know that there were isolated voices claiming that Russia isn't that bad, but whatever.) But there's no coincidence that Trump comes out and says that he's going to stop aid to Ukraine and support Russia and then Tucker Carlson does the most evil, immoral interview with Vladimir Putin himself.  That kind of puff piece is sickening.  Sure, Carlson isn't Fox News anymore.  That isn't slowing him down one bit.  I dare you to watch those clips.  Even Putin can't respect Carlson in those segments.  He finds him to be a joke.  But that's the message that is going on right now.

The insane thing is that 20 Days in Mariupol and Tucker Carlson's interview can't exist in harmony.  Sure, Russian subways look nice.  It's because it is a police state where any crime is punishable by death.  When I think of the great problems that America is dealing with right now, dirty subways aren't the issue.  Fun grocery stores aren't the issue.  (Jon Stewart pointed out that grocery stores may look cheap, but the living wage doesn't allow for most groceries to be considered affordable.) God, do you know what I want to do so much?  I want to sit down Tucker Carlson and force him to watch 20 Days in Mariupol, then screen his interview.  Then I want him to watch 20 Days again and defend himself.  It's criminal what he did.  And I'm not the first person to point that out, but he knows exactly what's going on in Ukraine.  He just is that much of a sycophant of Trump that his integrity means nothing.

We don't always get things right in America.  But one thing that Biden did absolutely right was to support Vladmir Zelensky in his fight against this.  I hate that Ukraine looks like Syria.  Syria was our red flag.  It was the thing that let us know that Putin was a sociopath who relished in the death of people in an attempt to return Russia to its former place of power.  Yet, here we are.  People are forgetting the violence that happened.  Here is documentation of the atrocities happening out there and, in a way that continues to break my heart, no one seems to care anymore.