“2000 Meters to Andriivka” Places Audiences in the Ukrainian Trenches

By Lucy Spicer

“This is a story of a very small village,” begins filmmaker and journalist Mstyslav Chernov before the premiere of 2000 Meters to Andriivka. “It is a personal story, of course, like any story from Ukraine. It’s just two hours away from my hometown.” But it soon becomes evident that the events in and around Andriivka can be considered a microcosm for what’s happening to Ukraine as a whole. “There are so many villages. There are so many cities. This is just one,” adds Chernov at the film’s post-screening Q&A.

Chernov’s directorial debut, 20 Days in Mariupol, premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival before winning the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. Now, the director is back in Park City to premiere his latest documentary in the Festival’s World Cinema Documentary Competition at The Ray Theatre on January 23. This follow-up film echoes the devastation and loss displayed in his feature debut, but Chernov’s 2000 Meters to Andriivka relies on a singularly claustrophobic, upsetting, and mind-numbing first-person view of combat, achieved by editing together footage from the cameras in soldiers’ body armor. 

The documentary follows a Ukrainian platoon attempting to inch their way toward the strategic village of Andriivka, which they hope to reclaim from Russian occupation during the 2023 counteroffensive. Their milelong journey travels a narrow strip of charred forest flanked by minefields, but amid the flimsy cover provided by bare trees are trenches and holes where Russian soldiers wait to attack. The footage from the Ukrainians’ body cameras depicts a landscape of deadly chaos. Voices yelling, bullets and grenades flying from unseen sources, bodies collapsing with distressed cries or wordless finality. 

Interspersed with these terrifying, cacophonous bursts of activity are clips of Chernov interviewing soldiers as they wait for their next directive along this perilous slog. These are men who left their normal lives to volunteer to fight, and many are young, barely past the threshold of adulthood. And even as they face the daily destruction of life and land, some manage to hold onto hope, saying that they are fighting for the chance to rebuild what has been lost. But in many cases, these hopeful young men will be dead before audiences can hear their words for the first time. “One of the hardest decisions to make was to tell you along the way that these really remarkable men died,” says producer Raney Aronson-Rath at the film’s post-premiere Q&A. “And that was something that really happened as we were making it,” she continues, adding that the knowledge of the soldiers’ fates rendered these scenes even more meaningful during the editing process. 

“This film has changed its meaning many times while we were making it, because as we’re making it, more and more of those people we knew were dying,” says Chernov. “The entire meaning of the story has changed. It started as this victorious story and then suddenly across the year it became something else.”

But Chernov is wary of suggesting a message for his work. “I don’t like messages. I don’t like imperatives. I don’t like moralized people. I really, really like to ask questions,” he explains. “What was important for me — and this comes through with the first shot of the film with the quote — that names matter. They should be remembered. It’s part of our history, and every person, every name matters. That’s really what I want.”