20 Days in Mariupol

20 Days in Mariupol (2023) is a documentary you can watch online on iFILM. Director and cinematographer Mstyslav Chernov, photographer Evgeniy Maloletka, and producer Liudmyla Amelkina were already in Mariupol when the invasion started. They stayed for twenty days after every other international journalist had left.

What those twenty days produced: footage of a maternity hospital struck by air strikes, bodies left on frozen streets, surgeons operating by flashlight in basement wards, graves dug in schoolyards because the cemeteries were unreachable. The team filed when they could find a signal — sometimes a few minutes of connection was all they had to upload what would become some of the most widely seen images of the war.

The film took the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature at the 2024 ceremony, the first Oscar ever claimed by a Ukrainian production. There is no narration framing events in hindsight. The camera was there as it happened, operated by people who decided staying was the job. Stream 20 Days in Mariupol (2023) online on iFILM.