“Every film about war ends up being pro-war,” François Truffaut once said in a 1973 interview with Gene Siskel in the Chicago Tribune.
In a sense, he’s still right about that even when considering Mstyslav Chernov‘s “2000 Meters to Andriivka,” one of the most visceral, experiential depictions of combat ever captured in a documentary. The Ukrainian director, who won the Best Documentary Feature Oscar for his previous “20 Days in Mariupol,” is clearly glorifying his country’s righteous struggle against the Russian invaders, and in that practical sense, this is not an anti-war film. On an existential level, however, “2000 Meters to Andriivka” is absolutely an anti-war film, one that shows the numbing futility of combat like nothing else viewers may have ever seen.
Chernov, an Associated Press war correspondent in various theaters of combat around the world before war came to his native Ukraine, is extraordinarily adept at capturing this nuance: The war we see the Ukrainian soldiers wage is grueling and, in many ways pointless, in a way that probably hasn’t been seen since the trench warfare of World War I. And yet unlike, World War I, this is a war that absolutely has to be fought.
He edited together “2000 Meters to Andriivka” largely from body camera footage taken by actual Ukrainian soldiers in combat. It is jarring to watch, like the freneticism of racing heartbeats and darting eyeballs — it’s beyond the motion-sickness-inducing jerkiness of a handheld camera because these images aren’t even handheld. But you’re seeing what the soldiers are seeing, and, like that other recent film built largely around first-person camera perspectives, “Nickel Boys,” it gives an even greater subjective identification to the person through whose eyes you’re seeing.
The spine of the movie is formed by a particular objective: We’re watching the soldiers of Ukraine’s 3rd Assault Brigade trying to retake the tiny town of Andriivka, which is seen as a crucial waypoint for the eventual recapture of the Donetsk city Bakhmut, which fell to the Russians near the start of the war in 2022. The events captured here are in 2023 as Ukraine attempted its famously stalled counteroffensive. In order to take Andriivka, they have to approach the village via a thin strip of a brambly forest that runs for 2,000 meters in a straight line to the town. It’ll give them cover, though it also hides many foxholes where Russians are entrenched. Clearing out the forest means it’s a war of inches, with the Ukrainians typically having to crawl to keep out of sight of the enemy. Covering these 2,000 meters will take days on end.
Chernov focuses on several soldiers in particular and often punctuates his own direct-to-camera conversation with them with his own haunting voiceover, saying that they died some months later. We see one soldier lying dead amid a firefight, his comrade crawling up to him to make sure — and Chernov filmed the funeral in the soldier’s hometown some time later, the entire community turning out to pay their respects to a fallen hero.
What’s striking about each of the firefights we witness at various stages of the 2,000-meter trek is how very much the same they are: An AK-47 sticks out from the bottom of the frame (the worst thing you could say about relying on the first-person POV of the body camera footage is that it often feels like a first-person-shooter video game) firing at targets barely even glimpsed, amid a tangle of twisted branches. It’s jarring and repetitive to the point of numbing. This is a case of cinema certainly not making war exciting, but stultifying in its tedium. And yet it still has to be fought. These fighters are holding the line against Russians in Eastern Ukraine so that the invaders don’t overwhelm the entire country and then threaten NATO.
But can they survive long enough to outlast the Russian onslaught? When they finally take Andriivka, it’s as much of a Pyrrhic victory as anything you can imagine, with a cat the soldiers rescue as the only living thing still there, and the buildings so wrecked from the bombardments that there’s not even a suitable place to hoist the Ukrainian flag. How can such an empty victory lead to Ukraine’s continued survival? (And, of course, there’s an even more grim epilogue note about the town’s ultimate fate.)
“2000 Meters to Andriivka” is a grueling watch that can’t possibly capture the full extent of the traumatic day-to-day of waging this war. But even capturing a slice of it is a triumph of empathetic identification. And a rebuke to those who don’t think this struggle is worth fighting. Can a film be pro-war and anti-war at the same time? This one is.
Grade: B+
“2000 Meters to Andriivka” world premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival in the World Cinema Documentary Competition. It is a production of PBS’s “Frontline” and the AP and is looking for theatrical distribution.
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