2,000 Metres to Andriivka

For those of us fortunate enough never to have entered a warzone, there are primary reference points to which we defer for understanding: the stark images captured by photojournalists for morning papers; the low-res video imagery of the nightly news; the cinematic sweep of movie epics and the lizard-brain clatter of first-person shooters. When confronted with the images and sounds of the real thing, perhaps the most distressing aspect is how palatable it all can feel, how easily digestible. We’ve been carefully prepared for what to expect – the visual grammar of ducking, hiding, advancing, blindly shooting and grenade-throwing.

Watching Mstyslav Chernov’s sobering second documentary feature – his first, 2023’s 20 Days in Mariupol, centred on a different pocket of resistance to Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, a journalistic team – there is much-justified cause for queasiness from the jump. As Chernov’s narration calmly informs us, many of the (often painfully young) men with whom we spend time over the course of the film will be dead or missing within months or even weeks of the footage being filmed. The village they are on a mission to free from Russian occupation will already have been recaptured by the time the film concludes (it first bowed at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2025), smothering all we’ve seen in suffocating layers of futility. Still, most disconcerting is the real-time bodycam footage that comprises much of 2,000 Metres. Through multiple shootouts, one suspects the numbing banality of the footage is wholly intentional, but the stop-start, inescapably videogame-like effect raises questions all the same.

There is no doubt as to the urgent importance of Chernov’s work (the filmmaker was already an accomplished Associated Press journalist and war correspondent prior to his documentary films) in capturing the lives and dignity of those striving to carry out their duty to their country in spite of ceaselessly bleak circumstances. 2,000 Metres is no work of narrative docudrama, and it cannot be faulted for simply presenting real combat as it was actually witnessed, nor for capturing the honest admissions of its subjects during rare rest periods (one man in the platoon protests being filmed without yet having any worthwhile accomplishments to show for it). But by taking this footage, judiciously editing it (as Michelle Minzer has done), setting it to a low, thrumming score by Sam Slater, and shaping it into a work of cinema, one wonders whether 2,000 Metres qualifies as an inadvertent aestheticisation of its subject, in spite of its moral rigour and journalistic clarity. When taking stock of so much fictionalised onscreen warfare, one can’t help but wonder if what is being offered here is not altogether dissimilar: a tasteful means of experiencing by proxy the adrenalised peril of combat, from the many layers of safe remove provided by the cinema screen, at no personal risk.

Is form servicing function by fully embodying the numbing, draining effect of being at the forefront of a military counter-offensive? One suspects so, while also wishing Chernov and co.’s film were somehow less of an obvious technical achievement, less like something you felt oddly able to bear. It’s important not to look away – but looking at it remains a very great distance from living it.

Ultimately, this documentary provides an indisputably valuable up-close portrait of the illegal invasion of Ukraine from the perspective of the soldiers at the forefront of the counter-offensive. The work is technically exacting while remaining attentive to the lives and stories of the men, as well as those left to mourn them. Whatever alienating queasiness is exerted by its form is no doubt intentional, underlining the sobering futility of a conflict the film’s subjects openly speculate may last their entire lifetimes, should they survive.