Eyewitness documentary shot by war reporter Mstyslav Chernov during the Russian siege of the Ukrainian city takes Academy Award – the country’s first
The Ukrainian film 20 Days in Mariupol, which was shot inside the besieged port city during the assault by Russian forces, has won the best documentary Oscar at the Academy Awards in Los Angeles.
Directed by Mstyslav Chernov, a Ukrainian journalist who documented the invasion in early 2022, 20 Days in Mariupol drew wide acclaim after its premiere at the Sundance film festival in 2023, with the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw calling it “a searing film [that] bears a terrible witness to this great crime” in a five-star review. In an interview with the Guardian, Chernov described the film as “some kind of collective resistance to tragedy”.
It’s great that two organizations that more or less act in the public interest won an academy award.
20 days in Mariupol is the work of the Associated Press and PBS’s Frontline. This has to be one of the first times that a major documentary winner wasn’t attached to a for-profit studio.