As Russia’s unconscionable war on Ukraine wears on, the local and global response to it has shifted from shock to fury to numbed despair — and the already substantial library of documentaries made in response to it has likewise varied in focus and tenor. Two years ago, Ukrainian journalist and filmmaker Mstyslav Chernov premiered “20 Days in Mariupol,” a bruisingly effective, ultimately Oscar-winning immersion into civilian panic and terror in the first weeks of the Russian invasion in 2022: a tough, in-the-moment watch, colored by raw trauma, but also a streak of fighting fury. Now, Chernov follows up that unrepeatable work with “2000 Meters to Andriivka” — an ostensible companion piece, as indicated by its similar numerical title, and another full-tilt, you-are-there plunge into the living hell of war, this time from the perspective of Ukrainian soldiers on the frontline.
Like its predecessor, this is an angry, viscerally illustrative film — but it’s a weary one too, occasionally narrating its first-hand view of military combat with the jaundiced sense of futility that comes with living through long-term conflict. Some of the soldiers whom Chernov follows into battle remain gung-ho about defeating the enemy, though others, like the filmmaker himself, voice fears that there’s no end in sight. “This war is a nightmare none of can wake up from,” he says in voiceover, after a soldier admits to dreaming nightly about the very battles he fights in his waking hours. Once again produced by Frontline and the Associated Press — and again premiering in Sundance’s world documentary competition — “Andriivka” is a less tersely journalistic and more pensively devastating work than “Mariupol”: a film of its moment, and an agonizingly extended moment at that.
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As the title implies, the doc is structured around a physical objective — Andriivka being a small village in eastern Ukraine that Russian forces occupied in late 2022. It’s a remote location at the best of times; in these worst of times, it’s surrounded by vast minefields, and accessible only via a narrow strip of once-forested land that now resembles a cemetery for nature itself, crisscrossed with burnt-out tree trunks resembling giant used matches. This is the unforgiving route that the volunteer soldiers of Ukraine’s Third Assault Brigade must travel down in order to reclaim the village, for a seemingly short distance of 2000 meters (one-and-a-quarter miles, for the imperial-minded) that Russian fortification renders an arduous, deadly obstacle course.
Stark title cards count down the remaining distance as the brigade — accompanied by Chernov and fellow AP journo Alex Babenko, equipped with bodycams — inch their way down this purgatorial path to freedom, often holing up in trenches as they await a go-ahead, gunfire rattling back and forth over their heads. In at least one upsettingly candid shot, a soldier dies before our eyes, while others are grievously wounded; even a doughty unit leader like Fedya, a 24-year-old former warehouse worker who describes his mission as “to fight, not serve,” is as vulnerable as the rest of them, at one point requiring hospitalization before plunging straight back into the danger zone.
Amid the turmoil, Chernov’s camera captures small, poignant character sketches of the Ukrainian men putting their lives on the line to potentially win back one patch of land. One muses drolly about the calming benefits of rolling cigarettes, while another observes that his time in the Ukrainian army has made him understand his wife better: “I worry about her because she worries about me, and I see how much stress goes into that worrying.” At certain intervals, Chernov’s English-language voiceover jolts us out of the urgent present-tense action to inform the audience which of the men on screen have subsequently died, somewhat undercutting whatever progress is shown towards Andriivka.
This staggered perspective eventually diverts the film from what had seemed a linear, mission-based structure. Following the death of Fedya’s second-in-command, Chernov and editor Michelle Mizner bluntly flash forward to the soldier’s funeral in his hometown 600 miles away — a community by now all too accustomed to such ceremonies for slain young men. “They say that heroes don’t die, but they do,” says the late man’s partner despondently: A spirit of public pessimism is echoed by sampled news reports detailing the failures of Ukraine’s attempted counteroffensive in 2023, of which the battle for Andriivka is merely one component. When the brigade finally reach the village — a ruined wasteland of rubble and ash — there’s nothing left to claim or save, but for one starved, frightened cat tenderly bundled by soldiers into a backpack.
As they declare one small, symbolic victory, some of the men are bullish about its implications for the wider cause — but Chernov, again in voiceover, can’t suppress his doubts, fearing dwindling momentum and the increasing indifference of the rest of the world, as newer global crises take headline precedence. “2000 Meters to Andriivka” is a documentary both vigorous and exhausted, propulsive and petrified, with a prevailing tone of anxious fatigue encapsulated by one soldier’s plaintive, barbed question: “What if this war is until the end of our lives?” For too many of his lost peers, it already has been.