Inside the Visceral Wartime Portrait of '2000 Meters to Andriivka'

“You never know with a documentary ,” says Oscar-winning filmmaker Mstyslav Chernov . “You hope that you’ll get there.”

The statement could apply to most any film being captured in real time, but in this case, Chernov means it literally. His new film, 2000 Meters to Andriivka , follows a Ukrainian platoon in 2023 on a wartime mission to liberate a Russian-occupied village. Chernov is embedded with the soldiers as they go forward, inch by inch — the distance is not terribly long, though the process of getting there is meticulous and perilous — and so the question of his movie was less how it would turn out than whether it could be completed at all.

“You never know with a documentary ,” says Oscar-winning filmmaker Mstyslav Chernov . “You hope that you’ll get there.”

The state