“Each movie about struggle finally ends up being pro-war,” François Truffaut as soon as stated in a 1973 interview with Gene Siskel within the Chicago Tribune.
In a way, he’s nonetheless proper about that even when contemplating Mstyslav Chernov‘s “2000 Meters to Andriivka,” one of the crucial visceral, experiential depictions of fight ever captured in a documentary. The Ukrainian director, who received the Finest Documentary Characteristic Oscar for his earlier “20 Days in Mariupol,” is clearly glorifying his nation’s righteous wrestle in opposition to the Russian invaders, and in that sensible sense, this isn’t an anti-war movie. On an existential stage, nevertheless, “2000 Meters to Andriivka” is completely an anti-war movie, one which reveals the numbing futility of fight like nothing else viewers could have ever seen.
Chernov, an Related Press struggle correspondent in numerous theaters of fight all over the world earlier than struggle got here to his native Ukraine, is awfully adept at capturing this nuance: The struggle we see the Ukrainian troopers wage is grueling and, in some ways pointless, in a manner that in all probability hasn’t been seen for the reason that trench warfare of World Struggle I. And but in contrast to, World Struggle I, it is a struggle that completely needs to be fought.
He edited collectively “2000 Meters to Andriivka” largely from physique digicam footage taken by precise Ukrainian troopers in fight. It’s jarring to observe, just like the freneticism of racing heartbeats and darting eyeballs — it’s past the motion-sickness-inducing jerkiness of a handheld digicam as a result of these photographs aren’t even handheld. However you’re seeing what the troopers are seeing, and, like that different latest movie constructed largely round first-person digicam views, “Nickel Boys,” it offers an excellent larger subjective identification to the individual by whose eyes you’re seeing.
The backbone of the film is fashioned by a selected goal: We’re watching the troopers of Ukraine’s third Assault Brigade making an attempt to retake the tiny city of Andriivka, which is seen as an important waypoint for the eventual recapture of the Donetsk metropolis Bakhmut, which fell to the Russians close to the beginning of the struggle in 2022. The occasions captured listed below are in 2023 as Ukraine tried its famously stalled counteroffensive. To be able to take Andriivka, they must strategy the village through a skinny strip of a brambly forest that runs for two,000 meters in a straight line to the city. It’ll give them cowl, although it additionally hides many foxholes the place Russians are entrenched. Clearing out the forest means it’s a struggle of inches, with the Ukrainians usually having to crawl to maintain out of sight of the enemy. Protecting these 2,000 meters will take days on finish.
Chernov focuses on a number of troopers particularly and infrequently punctuates his personal direct-to-camera dialog with them together with his personal haunting voiceover, saying that they died some months later. We see one soldier mendacity lifeless amid a firefight, his comrade crawling as much as him to ensure — and Chernov filmed the funeral within the soldier’s hometown a while later, your complete neighborhood turning out to pay their respects to a fallen hero.
What’s hanging about every of the firefights we witness at numerous levels of the two,000-meter trek is how very a lot the identical they’re: An AK-47 stands proud from the underside of the body (the worst factor you possibly can say about counting on the first-person POV of the physique digicam footage is that it usually looks like a first-person-shooter online game) firing at targets barely even glimpsed, amid a tangle of twisted branches. It’s jarring and repetitive to the purpose of numbing. This can be a case of cinema definitely not making struggle thrilling, however stultifying in its tedium. And but it nonetheless needs to be fought. These fighters are holding the road in opposition to Russians in Japanese Ukraine in order that the invaders don’t overwhelm your complete nation after which threaten NATO.
However can they survive lengthy sufficient to outlast the Russian onslaught? After they lastly take Andriivka, it’s as a lot of a Pyrrhic victory as something you possibly can think about, with a cat the troopers rescue as the one residing factor nonetheless there, and the buildings so wrecked from the bombardments that there’s not even an appropriate place to hoist the Ukrainian flag. How can such an empty victory result in Ukraine’s continued survival? (And, in fact, there’s an much more grim epilogue notice in regards to the city’s final destiny.)
“2000 Meters to Andriivka” is a grueling watch that may’t presumably seize the total extent of the traumatic day-to-day of waging this struggle. However even capturing a slice of it’s a triumph of empathetic identification. And a rebuke to those that don’t assume this wrestle is price combating. Can a movie be pro-war and anti-war on the similar time? This one is.
Grade: B+
“2000 Meters to Andriivka” world premiered on the 2025 Sundance Movie Competition within the World Cinema Documentary Competitors. It’s a manufacturing of PBS’s “Frontline” and the AP and is on the lookout for theatrical distribution.