Photographer and director Mstyslav Chernov is finishing work on a new film. Detector Media writes that at Kyiv Media Week 2024 he told that it is dedicated to the Ukraine’s 2023 counteroffensive
Chernov is currently in the United States, where he is editing the film. ‘Now we sleep in the editing room’, the director said.
He also noted the difficulty of finding financing for a film, as investors are afraid to put money in at the production stage ‘because the director or character might die’. ‘It is much easier to find money for a finished product’, he added.
The title and release date of the film are unknown.
About ‘20 Days in Mariupol’
In August 2023, ‘20 Days in Mariupol’ was released in Ukraine. The film tells about the russian attack on the city on February 24, 2022, the bombing of residential areas and a maternity hospital, the people who lived and worked under the blockade of the city and how Chernov and his colleagues — photographer Evgeniy Maloletka and journalist Vasilisa Stepanenko — managed to escape from the city surrounded by russian occupiers.
Mstyslav Chernov made all the footage during his ‘20 days in Mariupol’. According to the videographer, he has been covering military conflicts for nine years, but ‘this film is a personal story’ because ‘it is the story of the community, our community, our people’.
Read our interview: ‘The director of ‘20 Days in Mariupol’: ‘We all accepted our deaths in a way’’‘
We did everything we could to break the information blockade, to tell the stories of Mariupol residents, — Mstyslav told the Sundance festival team, where the film won the Audience Award. — Some of the footage you may have seen on the news. Images of destroyed neighborhoods, russian bombs hitting a maternity hospital, doctors trying to save the lives of children hit by shrapnel, parents grieving, mass graves where children are buried’.
In May 2023, Chernov, Stepanenko, Maloletka, along with the American journalist Lori Hinnant who supervised their work, received the Pulitzer Prize.
In February, ‘20 Days in Mariupol’ won the main British film award BAFTA for Best Documentary , and in March it won the best documentary Oscar.
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