20 Days in Mariupol (2023)

QFS No. 135 - The invitation for March 13, 2024
Long time QFS members know that we rarely select documentary films due to a long-standing bias against them within the ranks of our QFS Council of Excellence. This is only our third documentary selection. The other two – Honeyland (2019, QFS No. 5) and Flee (2021, QFS No. 69) were also both nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the Academy Awards, with Honeyland taking the prize in the 2020 Covid year Oscars. Flee did not win, but was the first film ever to be nominated for both Best Documentary Feature and Best Animated Feature – a feat which is still pretty astonishing. It remains one of my personal favorite films of the decade. 

What both those films had in common were that although documentary films, they felt as if they were scripted narrative features. Honeyland followed an old lady  in Macedonia harvesting honey the old-fashioned way as if it was a scripted movie, in a sense. Flee also had a scripted animated feature film feel – both because of the story of the protagonist’s life and the masterful manner in which it was told.

Which brings us to 20 Days in Mariupol (2023) – a documentary which will likely have a similar narrative action film feeling. The story was introduced to me last year by my brother who sent me this link to an Associated Press story by and about AP journalists trapped in Ukraine as the Russians invaded. They had been reporting from the battlefield and soon discovered that they were also being hunted. As most of you know, my brother is a journalist and he first learned of this incredible story while serving on a committee that selected these reporters for an award. Of course upon reading the story myself, I immediately knew this was a movie and started to look into whether the rights were available. Little did I know that the documentary was being finalized with footage from the frontlines by the journalists themselves. A movie, in some fashion, was already in the works. 

The story is incredible and let me give you the lede right here: “The Russians were hunting us down. They had a list of names, including ours, and they were closing in.”

If that’s not the way to begin a great story – on screen or in print or otherwise – then I don’t know what is. The fact that it’s also a true story and one that we can watch, well I think we ought to do that.

20 Days in Mariupol (2023) directed by Mstyslav Chernov

Reactions and Analyses:
What can a documentary do that a scripted feature film cannot? This is one of the questions that went through my mind as I watched 20 Days in Mariupol (2023) and one of the first aspects of the film we discussed. In a narrative film, even a bleak film featuring war, desperation, doom and destruction all around – you would be hard pressed to find a movie that didn’t have some inkling of hope. Some path to escape, at least, if not victory outright for the protagonist.

In a documentary, however, there’s no expectation that you will receive that olive branch or lifeline from the filmmaker. The film can be as relentless as it needs to be because this is real. In a feature film, the filmmakers would (rightly?) be trashed for putting the audience through something relentlessly harrowing. In a documentary, you can turn that feeling into something like a duty to watch it. Because providing witness is what the filmmakers are hoping for in showcasing it for an audience.

One in our group put it that way – it felt like our duty to watch 20 Days in Mariupol. In part because the filmmaker-journalists made it their mission to make sure the world knew what was happening in Mariupol. Going into this film, I had some knowledge of what the filmmakers went through, having read the Associated Press reporting and also the story of the filmmakers being personally targeted by the Russian troops. I expected the filmmakers to include themselves in the storytelling, much in the way The Cove (2009) did – also an Oscar winner for Best Documentary Feature – as someone in the QFS group brought up that parallel.

Refreshingly, the filmmakers of 20 Days in Mariupol did not give in to making the film about themselves beyond what was necessary to tell the story. Although Mstyslav Chernov’s voice guides us in voiceover, the camera is never turned inward. He reflects on occasion about being Ukrainian and there are artistic vignettes of a hand covered in sand and images of his children playing in safety, for example. But they are, thankfully, very few and used at just the right times and just the right ways to break up the constant movement and bloodshed we witness on screen.

To that point, another in our group brought up the moments where the filmmaker sits down, camera still rolling, and we see a hallway sideways or the ground, not focused on anything in particular. The filmmaker catches his breath, taking in the horror and pausing from showing more if it. The moments are needed relief and are a fascinating way of involving the filmmaker in the story in a subtle way. An editor and director could have easily cut those parts out as they don’t advance the “story” or any narrative, but keeping those moments in both help to humanize our filmmaker guides through the film but also to emphasize that we are in this with them – experiencing this with them.

One member of the group mentioned that we never see the filmmaker’s face (until the very end). And yet, we are riveted – we want him to survive. He is us. In that extraordinary action sequence when they have to escape the occupied city with a Ukrainian special strike force, the filmmaking is as good as any you’ll see in a modern war film or a video game. We’re running, we see the soldier in front of us talking when paused around a corner, we dive when an airplane screams overhead. We’re on the edge of our seat, wondering how the filmmaker will survive. And yet – we’ve never seen his face.

That’s a pretty remarkable feat. Perhaps it’s because it is us. We are looking and experiencing the world with this filmmaker and exclusively through his eyes throughout – which is perhaps another thing documentary does that a feature film wouldn’t be able to get away with necessarily. Not seeing the protagonist at all and playing the film entirely through point of view is a hallmark of “documentary style” but often you see clever ways a narrative filmmaker will at least give us a glimpse of the person holding the fictitious camera. But in the documentary, we don’t see the person holding the camera, favoring instead the horror but not in a gratuitous way – it’s real, seen how a person would. At times directly, at times looking away, searching for something else but drawn back to the calamity. The blood, the babies dying or living, the people grieving the death of a child or other family member. We experience it in what feels like real time through the filmmaker’s eyes.

And finally – since this is such a recent war, one still going on, there are so many elements that make it feel truly “modern.” There’s the mission to get internet. Seeing the dozens of power strips so people can charge their phones just to use them as flashlights. The familiar buildings (e.g. Crossfit gym!) being used as shelters or bombed out malls. And then, the entire social media storyline in which the Russians accuse the reporters of faking the bombed out maternity ward and using crisis actors. “Fake news,” if you will. History isn’t just written by the victors, it’s being written in real time – as one of our QFSers put it.

In Chernov’s Academy Award just a few days ago, he said:

“But I can't change history, I can't change the past, but we are all together, you and I, we are among the most talented people in the world. We can make sure that history is corrected, that the truth prevails. And so that the people of Mariupol who died and those who gave their lives will never be forgotten. Because cinema shapes memories, and memories shape history."

Chernov’s use of footage he shot which then later appears as news footage in television programs around the world is incredibly effective in so many ways, but in one way in particular. It reminds us that one of the main driving narrative thrusts of the film is we need to get the story to the world. To prove it happened and so no one forgets. The fact that it was real, that it was a documentary, makes it more urgent for the filmmakers to share it and for the world’s eyes to see it. They got it out to the world and we’ve seen it. We were witness and it was, indeed, a duty to help shape memories and history.

Honeyland (2019)

QFS No. 5 - The invitation for May 27, 2020
In keeping with the randomness of the movie selection, it’s time to switch gears and watch a documentary feature film because who’s there to stop us? Though I’ve made a few of them, I’ve never selected a documentary to watch in any of the predecessor film societies before QFS. But Honeyland (2019) I’ve had on my watch list from last year so I figured why not.

I know very little about Honeyland other than the raving reviews I heard from trusted sources. I would’ve known even less but for the first time I permitted a guest selector to join me in choosing this week and I watched the trailer with her. Valarie found this trailer to be the most compelling of the five films I narrowed down for her.

So there you have it – a peek into the rigorous selection process that happens here at QFS Studios and Educational Institution for the Barely Stable. Also – not that this should be a sole reason you watch anything – this film won thirty four (34!) awards last year.

So this week we’ll watch this nonfiction film and apply our rigorous, unflinching, inebriated evaluation of its narrative as we would with any film. Join us if you can!

Honeyland (2019) Directed by Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov

Reactions and Analyses:
Written in March 2024 - Honeyland (2019) was a perfect selection for our first documentary film selection for the nascent Quarantine Film Society back in 2020. To date, we’ve only selected three nonfiction films, and all three have crossed over from documentary into traditional narrative film in some way. Our most recent documentary selection, last week’s 20 Days in Mariupol (2023), won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature Film, just as Honeyland did four years ago. 20 Days in Mariupol is an action-driven film that could easily be a narrative fiction film if it wasn’t crafted as urgent reporting from the frontlines. Flee (2021), was also nominated for a Doc Feature Oscar and though it didn’t win it similarly crossed boundaries as both nonfiction and animated - a feat so rarely pulled off.

Both of those QFS selections are documentary films that are not pure docs in the way that nonfiction films had historically been considered. The deft hand of the filmmaker was evident in crafting the story, and it very much feels like a “movie” rather than a “documentary.”

And while the filmmakers have made themselves virtually invisible in Honeyland, the film too defies the conventions of nonfiction storytelling. The narrative storyline of the film feels deftly crafted as a scripted tale - a woman, using an ancient craft, struggles against nature and time to provide for her family as she attempts to survive the encroachment of a modern society. If you squint just hard enough, you could imagine this film told in black-and-white in the 1960s as a neo-realist classic.

Except that it is “real” and not “realist.” Hatidze Muratova is one of the last keepers of wild bees, selling honey to local markets. Newcomers, an itinerant family, settle next door and while it starts off well - havoc ensues. This setup is a time-honored narrative convention - a person’s sense of normalcy is disrupted, setting off the story and a chain of events that test the protagonist. This is why this film was perfect for a group of filmmakers who mostly in the world of fiction. Not to mention, the cinematography was stunning and evoked a certain movie-like quailty.

Some of the stunning cinematography and landscape of Honeyland (2019).

I didn’t take detailed notes of our discussions when the QFS first started, but I remember one aspect of our analysis, and that was the role of the filmmaker. Some questioned whether the filmmaker has a duty to intervene or assist the subject if that subject is in danger. In particular, the boy from the family nearly drowns in a river. Were the filmmakers supposed to help? Would that violate a code of ethics? Or is there a greater moral obligation and duty to save the child? The child survives but it brought up questions that you don’t get when you watch a scripted film. There are many skeptics who question how much is real and how much is staged - another dimension of nonfiction filmmaker that does not come up for those of use working in fiction.

“Half for you, half for me.” (From Honeyland, 2019)

When we watched the film, the world was a strange place. Everything was shut down. We though we had to scrub our groceries and local officials shut down walkways and public spaces even though they were outside and could offer respite from our homes. Social order and democracy itself seemed to be crumbling all around us. So perhaps it was some comfort to watch a film taking place in the glowing sun of Macedonia and to hear a woman say to her bees “half for you, half for me.” If only to transport us elsewhere, which is what the best films - fiction or nonfiction - can do.