2000 Meters to Andriivka

AP photojournalist Mstyslav Chernov's follow-up to 20 Days in Mariupol, the powerful 2023 documentary that provided a first-hand, on-the-ground account of the first several weeks of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, is an even more harrowing documentary perspective from even closer to the front lines of this war—he's literally embedded with Ukranian soldiers advancing towards a small village in an attempt to retake it from Russians). Yet somehow it all comes across less impactfully since in the two intervening years this type of footage has become, for lack of a more appropriate word, commonplace. It is as if Chernov's latest documentary is answering the questions subtly raised in his previous one: What happens if the world doesn't witness the atrocities of war, and how long can people experience images like this before we become numb to them? This film is less tightly edited and more harrowing than 20 Days, which feels appropriate. The loss of life for a specific but somewhat meaningless objective feels as hard to take as what's depicted in Gallipoli, A Bridge Too Far, and Paths of Glory, yet somehow this real-life documentary about the here and now doesn't land with the same power as those fictionalized historical films. Few things about the horrific year 2025 are more depressing than that.