Something to watch tonight: Tuesday 12 March

20 Days in Mariupol (Chernov, 2023)

In the 2023 Booker Prize-winning novel, Prophet Song by Paul Lynch, the government of modern Ireland is slowly taken over by authoritarian forces who suppress disagreement using imprisonment and internment, eventually reducing the country to a bloody civil war as resistance fighters become as ruthless as the regime they are attempting to overthrow.

The purpose of the novel is to prompt empathy for the people all over the world who have become refugees, by showing how easily that social deterioration can happen in a civilised nation, one that’s supposedly composed of rules and norms.

I’ve been thinking about that book a lot recently because of various developments in our local political context, but it hit home pretty hard during the early scenes of 20 Days in Mariupol where the Russian invasion of Ukraine has only just been announced by Putin and the strategic port city – only 50 km from Russia – is bracing for the unknown.

Detached and semi-detached houses line broad boulevards that could be somewhere like Palmerston North. Apartment buildings surround social courtyards. There are soccer fields and fitness centres. The downtown has a human scale that New Zealanders will recognise. There’s a middle class normality everywhere. What is about to happen is simply inconceivable to them.

But soon after that, the shelling begins and some of those suburban houses are on fire. The horror of the siege, and then the invasion, of Mariupol has begun.

What happens after that is the rapid unscheduled disassembly of a society.

The hospitals fill up with civilians – many of them women and children – injured by munitions targeted at where they live, play and work. Soon, the few city workers still able to report for duty are digging mass graves for those that can’t be saved.

I was surprised – perhaps I shouldn’t have been – at the looting. The stupid greed on display as people steal wi-fi routers, soccer balls and hair gel. But maybe that’s a psychological response to the terror, a way to feel like you are in control of something. Anything.

The narrator quotes a Mariupol doctor: “War is like an X-ray. It shows you what’s inside everybody. Good people get better. Bad people get worse.”

20 Days in Mariupol is more than just a collection of gruesome news video. It’s much more strategically constructed than that. It’s a personal journey for director Mstyslav Chernov, a veteran correspondent reflecting on all the previous conflicts he has covered, and also acknowledging the survivor guilt after finally escaping the horror in one of the last ‘humanitarian corridors’ before the doors were shut for good on the Russian criminals and their barbarism.

But it is the remarkable record of the human tragedy that is the lasting legacy of the film. The images may be of Ukraine, but they stand for all the other atrocities that we have not seen. They are specific to Mariupol, but not unique.

I only sat down and watched this film yesterday and, yet, my dreams last night were full of images provoked by it.

So, I’m haunted by it now, which I’m not best pleased about, but it gives you an idea about how powerful the experience is.

One final thought about 20 Days in Mariupol …

The film would not exist if it wasn’t for the Ukrainian employees of the Associated Press who decided they had to stay in the city when the international media moved out.

While Chernov’s voiceover is sceptical of whether their footage will change anything – it never has before – Vladimir, the police captain who attempts to chaperone them through the chaos, is determined that they should film as much as they can and then get their evidence out to the world somehow.

Sure enough, we do see clips of their work featured on television networks all over the world, only for the reporters to be accused by the Russians of staging ‘fake news’ for propaganda purposes. The film proves the ridiculousness of that statement beyond all doubt.

So, it is a work of journalism, and a celebration of journalism, arriving in New Zealand at a time when – in less than three months – we will have about 200 fewer news-gatherers serving our own civil society – investigating, fact-checking, analysing, challenging.

Which brings me full-circle, back to Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song, and I’m asking myself – how impossible is that scenario? A lot less impossible without journalists, I should think.

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Where to watch 20 Days in Mariupol