2,000 Meters to Andriivka: an intense in-the-moment account of Russia’s war on Ukraine

• Reviewed from the 2025 Sundance Film Festival

With his two documentary features about the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, Mstyslav Chernov has established himself as a leading cinematic chronicler of modern warfare. In 2,000 Meters to Andriivka, Chernov turns his journalistic eye to a gruelling tree-by-tree battle to retake a strip of land leading to a strategic village. After winning an Academy Award for his story of escape from a Russian siege in 20 Days in Mariupol (2023), Chernov won a Best Director award at Sundance 2025 for this immersive record of combat and camaraderie, showing the kind of incremental campaigns undertaken to repel Russia’s advance. 

Divided into chapters marking the progress to Andriivka in metres, the film shows its mettle from the opening sequence, which builds to a harrowing evacuation from an immobilised personnel carrier. Throughout the movie, Chernov relies on extended body-cam shots to show a small Ukrainian brigade progressing through a terrain of ravaged earth, low spindly trees, and trenches, which sometimes harbour Russian soldiers. Drone attacks and artillery fire are a constant threat.  

Part of what distinguishes the film is the sustained nature of its battlefield sequences, as the roiling body-cam perspective uncannily evokes first-person shooter games. (“It’s like landing on a planet where everything is trying to kill you,” says an Ukraine soldier). The life-or-death stakes hit home through interspersed scenes with soldiers, whose conversations underline how these are ordinary people (including one warehouse worker) who have volunteered their lives. 

As in 20 Days in Mariupol, Chernov’s sobering voiceover is an important component of his filmmaking. Unusually, he describes the fates of soldiers during their appearances on screen: instead of a status update in the end credits, Chernov intones lines like “He will be injured in five months and die.” The technique is quietly bold, intensifying the film’s immediacy as it underlines the soldiers’ courage. 

Chernov’s purpose here is certainly not to show the ‘excitement’ of combat. The filmmaker demonstrates palpable discipline in conveying the experience of war, including its tedium and lack of resolution. But the craft of 2,000 Meters also aims to restore some needed narrative shape to Russia’s war on Ukraine. As a video journalist for the Associated Press, Chernov must know all too well how the trickle of news coverage can have the effect of abstraction, with pithy clips standing in for a hard-to-grasp whole. His in-the-moment footage, whether it’s combat or simply soldiers chatting, builds out a present-tense realism while skirting sensationalising arcs; he also dwells on the behind-the-scene logistics required off the battlefield. 

It’s not always clear how a skirmish will turn out, as when Ukrainian soldiers try to flush out Russians from their trench, and one begins to suspect the enemy’s slow surrender might be a ploy to run out the clock until drones arrive. (Lest that sound paranoid, consider that Chernov opts not to wear blue journalist vests because the Russian army has treated them as high-priority targets.) Chernov catches details along the way that sound like war-movie clichés, yet are utterly natural: one soldier is named “Freak,” another makes a vow in the face of death (a comically modest one: to smoke less), and battle cries of “Surrender, motherfucker!” ring out. 

But Chernov, to an almost surprising extent, is not pushing heroism on behalf of his country’s army. He’s fully cognisant of the daunting odds, given Ukraine’s fragile resources and the shortfalls in international support (since the film’s premiere the situation has grown potentially more perilous in new ways with the shocking American treatment of Ukraine and negotiations with Russia). While recognising the bravery of the soldiers, he also signals the queasy absurdity of war, drawing out a sequence about planting the Ukraine flag in Andriivka (now a barely identifiable cluster of rubble). The ceremony is part of declaring the mission accomplished, and yet that lonely flag underlines how much more fighting remains. 

Past waves of war documentaries about occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan often became foregone efforts in condemning the futility and human toll of imperialist hubris. The growing body of films about Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s criminal invasion support an unambiguously just cause, but Chernov feels intent on reporting exactly what he sees, not just what he (and we) hope will happen. That can be uncomfortable for a viewer, especially in a world of constant messaging and propaganda, but the result is a film with hard-won integrity that captures both Ukraine’s perseverance and the unsettling uncertainty of this war.