presents

a film by MSTYSLAV CHERNOVa production of FRONTLINE | PBS and The Associated Press**Ukrainian Entry - Best International Feature - 96th Academy Awards****WINNER - Critics Choice Documentary Awards 2023 - Best First Documentary Feature****WINNER - Critics Choice Documentary Awards 2023 - Best Political Feature****5 NOMINATIONS - Critics Choice Documentary Awards 2023****NOMINEE - Gotham Awards - Best Documentary Film 2023****OFFICIAL SELECTION - DOC NYC Shortlist: Features 2023****OFFICIAL SELECTION - IDFA Best of Fests 2023****WINNER – Audience Award World Cinema Documentary – Sundance Film Festival 2023****WINNER – Audience Favourite – Hot Docs Canadian Documentary Festival 2023****WINNER – Honorable Mention – Docaviv International Documentary Film Festival 2023****WINNER – Tim Hetherington Award – Sheffield Documentary Film Festival 2023****WINNER – Best International Director - DocEdge Film Festival 2023****WINNER - Best International Editing - DocEdge Film Festival 2023****WINNER - Greg Gund Memorial Award - Cleveland International Film Festival 2023 ****WINNER - Cinema for Peace Dove for The Most Valuable Documentary of the Year****WINNER - DocuDaysUA 2023 - DocuUkraine National Competition****WINNER - DocuDaysUA 2023 - Audience Award****WINNER - Ukrainian National Film Critics Kinokolo Award - Best Documentary 2023****WINNER - Ukrainian National Film Critics Kinokolo Award - Best Discovery 2023****FINALIST – duPont-Columbia Awards 2024**
Release Dates: July 14 at Film Forum in New York City July 21 at Laemmle Monica Film Center in
Los Angeles
Run Time: 94 minutes
Rating: Unrated
Languages: English and Ukrainian and Russian, with English Subtitles

Download Publicity Stills Download Theatrical Poster | 20DaysInMariupol.com
NEW YORK
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LOS ANGELESPUBLICITYDavid Magdael PR
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DISTRIBUTIONCONTACTPBS Distribution
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832.212.4128

SYNOPSISAn AP team of Ukrainian journalists trapped in the besieged city of Mariupol struggle to continue
their work documenting atrocities of the Russian invasion. As the only international reporters
who remain in the city, they capture what later become defining images of the war: dying children,
mass graves, the bombing of a maternity hospital, and more.
After nearly a decade covering international conflicts, including the Russia-Ukraine war, for The
Associated Press, 20 DAYS IN MARIUPOL is Mstyslav Chernov’s first feature film. The film draws
on Chernov’s daily news dispatches and personal footage of his own country at war. It offers avivid, harrowing account of civilians caught in the siege, as well as a window into what it’s like toreport from a conflict zone, and the impact of such journalism around the globe.

FILMMAKERSFILMED, WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY
Mstyslav Chernov
STILL PHOTOGRAPHER
Evgeniy Maloletka
FIELD PRODUCER
Vasilisa Stepanenko
EDITED BY
Michelle Mizner
PRODUCED BY
Mstyslav ChernovMichelle Mizner
Raney Aronson-RathDerl McCrudden
ORIGINAL MUSIC
Jordan Dykstra (BMI)

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DIRECTORS STATEMENT
Chernov documented the devastation in Mariupol, Ukraine, as described in his AP article "20Days in Mariupol: The Team that Documented the City’s Agony" (March 22, 2022, AP).
MARIUPOL, Ukraine (AP) — The Russians were hunting us down. They had a list of names,
including ours, and they were closing in.
We were the only international journalists left in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, and we had been
documenting its siege by Russian troops for more than two weeks. We were reporting inside thehospital when gunmen began stalking the corridors. Surgeons gave us white scrubs to wear as
camouflage.
Suddenly at dawn, a dozen soldiers burst in: “Where are the journalists, for fuck’s sake?”
I looked at their armbands, blue for Ukraine, and tried to calculate the odds that they were
Russians in disguise. I stepped forward to identify myself. “We’re here to get you out,” they said.
The walls of the surgery shook from artillery and machine gun fire outside, and it seemed safer
to stay inside. But the Ukrainian soldiers were under orders to take us with them.
Mstyslav Chernov is a video journalist for The Associated Press. This is his account of the siegeof Mariupol, as documented with photographer Evgeniy Maloletka and told to correspondent
Lori Hinnant.
We ran into the street, abandoning the doctors who had sheltered us, the pregnant women who
had been shelled and the people who slept in the hallways because they had nowhere else to go.
I felt terrible leaving them all behind.
Nine minutes, maybe 10, an eternity through roads and bombed-out apartment buildings. As
shells crashed nearby, we dropped to the ground. Time was measured from one shell to the next,
our bodies tense and breath held. Shockwave after shockwave jolted my chest, and my hands
went cold.
We reached an entryway, and armored cars whisked us to a darkened basement. Only then did
we learn from a policeman why the Ukrainians had risked the lives of soldiers to extract us fromthe hospital.
“If they catch you, they will get you on camera and they will make you say that everything you
filmed is a lie,” he said. “All your efforts and everything you have done in Mariupol will be in vain.”
The officer, who had once begged us to show the world his dying city, now pleaded with us togo. He nudged us toward the thousands of battered cars preparing to leave Mariupol.
It was March 15. We had no idea if we would make it out alive.
____3

As a teenager growing up in Ukraine in the city of Kharkiv, just 20 miles from the Russian border,
I learned how to handle a gun as part of the school curriculum. It seemed pointless. Ukraine, I
reasoned, was surrounded by friends.
I have since covered wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and the disputed territory of Nagorno Karabakh,
trying to show the world the devastation first-hand. But when the Americans and then theEuropeans evacuated their embassy staffs from the city of Kyiv this winter, and when I poredover maps of the Russian troop build-up just across from my hometown, my only thought was,“My poor country.”
In the first few days of the war, the Russians bombed the enormous Freedom Square in Kharkiv,
where I had hung out until my 20s.
I knew Russian forces would see the eastern port city of Mariupol as a strategic prize because of
its location on the Sea of Azov. So on the evening of Feb. 23, I headed there with my long-timecolleague Evgeniy Maloletka, a Ukrainian photographer for The Associated Press, in his white
Volkswagen van.
On the way, we started worrying about spare tires, and found online a man nearby willing to sell
to us in the middle of the night. We explained to him and to a cashier at the all-night grocery
store that we were preparing for war. They looked at us like we were crazy.
We pulled into Mariupol at 3:30 a.m. The war started an hour later.
About a quarter of Mariupol’s 430,000 residents left in those first days, while they still could. But
few people believed a war was coming, and by the time most realized their mistake, it was toolate.
One bomb at a time, the Russians cut electricity, water, food supplies and finally, crucially, thecell phone, radio and television towers. The few other journalists in the city got out before thelast connections were gone and a full blockade settled in.
The absence of information in a blockade accomplishes two goals.
Chaos is the first. People don’t know what’s going on, and they panic. At first I couldn’t
understand why Mariupol fell apart so quickly. Now I know it was because of the lack ofcommunication.
Impunity is the second goal. With no information coming out of a city, no pictures of demolishedbuildings and dying children, the Russian forces could do whatever they wanted. If not for us,
there would be nothing.
That’s why we took such risks to be able to send the world what we saw, and that’s what madeRussia angry enough to hunt us down.

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I have never, ever felt that breaking the silence was so important.
___
The deaths came fast. On Feb. 27, we watched as a doctor tried to save a little girl hit by shrapnel.
She died.
A second child died, then a third. Ambulances stopped picking up the wounded because people
couldn’t call them without a signal, and they couldn’t navigate the bombed-out streets.
The doctors pleaded with us to film families bringing in their own dead and wounded, and let us
use their dwindling generator power for our cameras. No one knows what’s going on in our city,
they said.
Shelling hit the hospital and the houses around. It shattered the windows of our van, blew a hole
into its side and punctured a tire. Sometimes we would run out to film a burning house and thenrun back amid the explosions.
There was still one place in the city to get a steady connection, outside a looted grocery store
on Budivel’nykiv Avenue. Once a day, we drove there and crouched beneath the stairs to upload
photos and video to the world. The stairs wouldn’t have done much to protect us, but it felt safer
than being out in the open.
The signal vanished by March 3. We tried to send our video from the 7th-floor windows of thehospital. It was from there that we saw the last shreds of the solid middle-class city of Mariupol
come apart.
The Port City superstore was being looted, and we headed that way through artillery and machine
gunfire. Dozens of people ran and pushed shopping carts loaded with electronics, food, clothes.
A shell exploded on the roof of the store, throwing me to the ground outside. I tensed, awaiting
a second hit, and cursed myself a hundred times because my camera wasn’t on to record it.
And there it was, another shell hitting the apartment building next to me with a terrible whoosh.
I shrank behind a corner for cover.
A teenager passed by rolling an office chair loaded with electronics, boxes tumbling off the sides.
“My friends were there and the shell hit 10 meters from us,” he told me. “I have no idea what
happened to them.”
We raced back to the hospital. Within 20 minutes, the injured came in, some of them scooped
into shopping carts.
For several days, the only link we had to the outside world was through a satellite phone. And
the only spot where that phone worked was out in the open, right next to a shell crater. I would
sit down, make myself small and try to catch the connection.

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Everybody was asking, please tell us when the war will be over. I had no answer.
Every single day, there would be a rumor that the Ukrainian army was going to come to breakthrough the siege. But no one came.
___
By this time I had witnessed deaths at the hospital, corpses in the streets, dozens of bodies shoved
into a mass grave. I had seen so much death that I was filming almost without taking it in.
On March 9, twin airstrikes shredded the plastic taped over our van’s windows. I saw the fireballjust a heartbeat before pain pierced my inner ear, my skin, my face.
We watched smoke rise from a maternity hospital. When we arrived, emergency workers werestill pulling bloodied pregnant women from the ruins.
Our batteries were almost out of juice, and we had no connection to send the images. Curfew
was minutes away. A police officer overheard us talking about how to get news of the hospitalbombing out.
“This will change the course of the war,” he said. He took us to a power source and an internet
connection.
We had recorded so many dead people and dead children, an endless line. I didn’t understandwhy he thought still more deaths could change anything.
I was wrong.
In the dark, we sent the images by lining up three mobile phones with the video file split into
three parts to speed the process up. It took hours, well beyond curfew. The shelling continued,
but the officers assigned to escort us through the city waited patiently.
Then our link to the world outside Mariupol was again severed.
We went back to an empty hotel basement with an aquarium now filled with dead goldfish. In
our isolation, we knew nothing about a growing Russian disinformation campaign to discredit ourwork.
The Russian Embassy in London put out two tweets calling the AP photos fake and claiming apregnant woman was an actress. The Russian ambassador held up copies of the photos at a U.N.
Security Council meeting and repeated lies about the attack on the maternity hospital.
In the meantime, in Mariupol, we were inundated with people asking us for the latest news fromthe war. So many people came to me and said, please film me so my family outside the city willknow I’m alive.

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By this time, no Ukrainian radio or TV signal was working in Mariupol. The only radio you could
catch broadcast twisted Russian lies — that Ukrainians were holding Mariupol hostage, shooting
at buildings, developing chemical weapons. The propaganda was so strong that some people wetalked to believed it despite the evidence of their own eyes.
The message was constantly repeated, in Soviet style: Mariupol is surrounded. Surrender yourweapons.
On March 11, in a brief call without details, our editor asked if we could find the women who
survived the maternity hospital airstrike to prove their existence. I realized the footage must havebeen powerful enough to provoke a response from the Russian government.
We found them at a hospital on the front line, some with babies and others in labor. We also
learned that one woman had lost her baby and then her own life.
We went up to the 7th floor to send the video from the tenuous Internet link. From there, I
watched as tank after tank rolled up alongside the hospital compound, each marked with theletter Z that had become the Russian emblem for the war.
We were surrounded: Dozens of doctors, hundreds of patients, and us.
___
The Ukrainian soldiers who had been protecting the hospital had vanished. And the path to ourvan, with our food, water and equipment, was covered by a Russian sniper who had already struck
a medic venturing outside.
Hours passed in darkness, as we listened to the explosions outside. That’s when the soldierscame to get us, shouting in Ukrainian.
It didn’t feel like a rescue. It felt like we were just being moved from one danger to another. By
this time, nowhere in Mariupol was safe, and there was no relief. You could die at any moment.
I felt amazingly grateful to the soldiers, but also numb. And ashamed that I was leaving.
We crammed into a Hyundai with a family of three and pulled into a 5-kilometer-long traffic jam
out of the city. Around 30,000 people made it out of Mariupol that day — so many that Russian
soldiers had no time to look closely into cars with windows covered with flapping bits of plastic.
People were nervous. They were fighting, screaming at each other. Every minute there was an
airplane or airstrike. The ground shook.
We crossed 15 Russian checkpoints. At each, the mother sitting in the front of our car would
pray furiously, loud enough for us to hear.

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As we drove through them — the third, the tenth, the 15th, all manned with soldiers with heavy
weapons — my hopes that Mariupol was going to survive were fading. I understood that just toreach the city, the Ukrainian army would have to break through so much ground. And it wasn’t
going to happen.
At sunset, we came to a bridge destroyed by the Ukrainians to stop the Russian advance. A Red
Cross convoy of about 20 cars was stuck there already. We all turned off the road together into
fields and back lanes.
The guards at checkpoint No. 15 spoke Russian in the rough accent of the Caucasus. Theyordered the whole convoy to cut the headlights to conceal the arms and equipment parked on
the roadside. I could barely make out the white Z painted on the vehicles.
As we pulled up to the sixteenth checkpoint, we heard voices. Ukrainian voices. I felt an
overwhelming relief. The mother in the front of the car burst into tears. We were out.
We were the last journalists in Mariupol. Now there are none.
We are still flooded by messages from people wanting to learn the fate of loved ones wephotographed and filmed. They write to us desperately and intimately, as though we are notstrangers, as though we can help them.
When a Russian airstrike hit a theater where hundreds of people had taken shelter late last week,
I could pinpoint exactly where we should go to learn about survivors, to hear firsthand what it
was like to be trapped for endless hours beneath piles of rubble. I know that building and thedestroyed homes around it. I know people who are trapped underneath it.
And on Sunday, Ukrainian authorities said Russia had bombed an art school with about 400 people
in it in Mariupol.
But we can no longer get there.

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FILMMAKER BIOGRAPHIES
Mstyslav Chernov | Director, Writer, Producer, Cinematographer
Mstyslav Chernov is a Pulitzer Prizewinning video journalist at The AssociatedPress and president of the Ukrainian
Association of Professional Photographers.
Since joining AP in 2014, he has covered
major conflicts, social issues andenvironmental crises across Europe, Asiaand the Middle East. Most recently,
Chernov documented Russia’s invasion of
Ukraine. Together with longtime colleague
Evgeniy Maloletka, Chernov recorded thesiege of Mariupol, showing the world eyewitness accounts of the Russian attacks on the city.
Chernov’s courageous reporting in Mariupol earned the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.
He was named 2016 Camera Operator of the Year and 2015 Young Talent of the Year by the
UK’s Royal Television Society.
He is from Eastern Ukraine and is based in Germany.
Vasilisa Stepanenko | Field Producer
Vasilisa Stepanenko is a Pulitzer Prize-winning AP video
journalist from the eastern city of Kharkiv, Ukraine, whose
work focuses on issue of human rights and social justice,especially related to the war in her country. She graduatedfrom Kharkiv State Academy of Culture. She has worked
for the Kharkiv Post and the television network Simon.
Stepanenko has worked with Mstyslav Chernov andEvgeniy Maloletka since before the start of the RussiaUkraine war, when she realized that it would be crucial –and more difficult than ever – to provide accurate information from eastern Ukraine. Starting in
Kharkiv – the hometown of both her and Chernov – the team realized that Mariupol would be
the first key to the war.
They arrived hours before the first rockets landed and were the only journalists working for aninternational news organization to stay in the city for more than two weeks, leaving just ahead of
the Russian takeover of the city center. Since then, Stepanenko has reported from Lviv andKharkiv as well.

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Stepanenko’s work in Mariupol earned the prestigious 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. She
has dedicated her work in Mariupol to the people there who lost their lives, families and homes
in the war.
Evgeniy Maloletka | Still Photographer
Evgeniy Maloletka is a Pulitzer Prize-winning Ukrainian photojournalist
covering the Russia-Ukraine war for The Associated Press.
Alongside AP video journalist Mstyslav Chernov and field producer Vasilisa
Stepanenko, Maloletka documented the fall of Mariupol and served as the
only international media inside the besieged city. The team’s reporting in
Mariupol earned the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.
Maloletka started his career in 2009 as a staff photographer for local
Ukrainian news agencies UNIAN and PHL. He went on to cover the 2014
Ukrainian Revolution, and the conflicts in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine, forvarious international media outlets. His work has been published and aired in TIME, The New
York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and BBC, among others.
Maloletka is from Eastern Ukraine and is based in Kyiv.
Michelle Mizner | Producer, Editor
Michelle Mizner is an Emmy-winning documentary producer and film
editor on staff at FRONTLINE PBS. Her work for the series has beenrecognized by the Peabodys, World Press Photo, duPont-Columbia
Awards, and SXSW. Select titles as a producer and editor include Life
in Baghdad (2015) and Inside Yemen (2017), with correspondent
Martin Smith, and The Last Call (2020) with director Marcela Gaviria.
In addition to films, Mizner has produced several acclaimed interactive
documentaries, including Inheritance (2016), The Last Generation(2018), and Un(re)solved. (2021). She is the producer and editor ofthe documentary 20 Days in Mariupol (dir. Mstyslav Chernov) which
will premiere at Sundance in 2023. 20 Days in Mariupol is her first feature-length film.
Raney Aronson-Rath | Producer
Raney Aronson-Rath is the editor-in-chief and executive producerof FRONTLINE, PBS’ flagship investigative journalism series, and isa leading voice on the future of journalism. Aronson-Rath oversees
FRONTLINE’s acclaimed investigative reporting on air and online
and directs the series’ editorial vision — executive producing morethan 20 in-depth documentaries each year on critical issues facing
the country and the world. FRONTLINE has won every major
award in broadcast journalism under Aronson-Rath’s leadership,including Emmy Awards, the first Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Gold10

Baton to be awarded in a decade, and the series’ first-ever Peabody Institutional Award. AronsonRath has also expanded FRONTLINE’s theatrical documentary footprint, with the series earning
its first-ever Academy Award nomination for Abacus: Small Enough to Jail in 2018 and its secondin 2020 for For Sama. Aronson-Rath joined FRONTLINE’s staff as a senior producer in 2007 after
producing notable FRONTLINE documentaries including News War, The Last Abortion Clinic,
The Jesus Factor, Law & Disorder, and Post Mortem. She was named deputy executive producer
by the series’ founder, David Fanning, in 2012, became executive producer in 2015, and named
editor-in-chief and executive producer in 2022. Before FRONTLINE, Aronson-Rath worked at
ABC News and The Wall Street Journal. She earned her bachelor’s degree from the Universityof Wisconsin and her master’s from Columbia Journalism School.
Derl McCrudden | Producer
Derl McCrudden is on the editorial management team of The
Associated Press and oversees global production at the news
agency. For the first few months of the 2022 invasion of
Ukraine he worked as part of the team deploying journalists
to cover the war and directing editorial coverage. He joined
AP in 2010 where his prior roles include overseeing visualand digital journalism, and he was also head of newsgathering
for international video. Previously in broadcast journalism,
McCrudden worked at British news provider ITN in London
in a range of roles from foreign affairs producer to news
editor – later he was a program editor producing primetime
flagship news bulletins. He covered the invasion of Iraq in
2003, the British military intervention in Sierra Leone in 2000 and the devastating earthquake inPakistan in 2005, as well as breaking news stories around the world. He joined the launch teamof Al Jazeera English in 2006 where he oversaw news coverage and production for the networkfrom its Asia broadcast center in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Jordan Dykstra | Composer
Jordan Dykstra is a Brooklyn-based composer and performer
specializing in both film and concert music. Besides scoring 20 Daysin Mariupol, his past features include Blow the Man Down (2019),
Globes (2021), Ovid, New York (2022), and Echo (2022). He
contributed to Fair Play (2023), Hail Satan? (2019), It Comes at
Night (2017), and Restless (2011). He has scored and contributed toseveral FRONTLINE films, including Plot to Overturn theElection (2022),
theEmmy
Award-winning documentary
Documenting Hate (2018-20), Michael Flynn’s Holy War (2022), andmany additional short films. His compositions for film have been
heard at Cannes, Sundance, TriBeCa, TIFF, and the IFFR, among
others. Dykstra's chamber music has been heard extensively
throughout Europe, North America, and Asia and recordings of his music (solo and collaborative)
have been issued by New World Records, Domino, Milan, Marriage, Mexican Summer, and many
more.

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PRODUCTION COMPANIESAbout APThe Associated Press is an independent global news organization dedicated to factual reporting.
Founded in 1846, AP today remains the most trusted source of fast, accurate, unbiased news in
all formats and the essential provider of the technology and services vital to the news business.
More than half the world’s population sees AP journalism every day. Online: www.ap.org
About FRONTLINEFRONTLINE, U.S. television’s longest running investigative documentary series, explores theissues of our times through powerful storytelling. FRONTLINE has won every major journalism
and broadcasting award, including 106 Emmy Awards and 31 Peabody Awards. Visit
pbs.org/frontline and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube to learn more.
FRONTLINE is produced at GBH in Boston and is broadcast nationwide on PBS. Funding for
FRONTLINE is provided through the support of PBS viewers and by the Corporation for Public
Broadcasting. Additional support for FRONTLINE is provided by the Abrams Foundation, Park
Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the FRONTLINE
Journalism Fund, with major support from Jon and Jo Ann Hagler on behalf of the Jon L. Hagler
Foundation, and additional support from Koo and Patricia Yuen.

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