20 Days In Mariupol film presented in Kyiv

On August 29, the premiere screening of the documentary called 20 Days In Mariupol took place in the capital’s House of Cinema. The film is about the first days of the city’s occupation, which was soon surrounded.

“Associated Press team members were the last international journalists in surrounded Mariupol. They continued their work in the siege and recorded footage that later became defining images of the war: the deaths of children, mass burials, a bombed-out maternity hospital, and other horrors of russian crimes,” the show organizers say.

“We collect the history of Mariupol in small pieces, as a lot was deleted at the checkpoints, a lot was burned, a lot was simply not recorded. And this vacuum is now being filled by russian propaganda,” the director of the film, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Mstyslav Chernov, said during the presentation.

According to Chernov, the most crucial task of journalists today is to show the world the scale of destruction caused by russia, and 20 Days In Mariupol fulfills this task.

The film won the Audience Award of the World Cinema Documentary Program (Sundance Film Festival, 2023) and the main award of the International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival, Docudays UA, 2023 – the Best Film of the National Competition.

The film will soon be run in cinemas in Ukraine.