Description
Winner of the Directing Award: World Cinema Documentary, Sundance Film Festival
Amid the failing counteroffensive, a journalist follows a Ukrainian platoon on their mission to traverse one mile of heavily fortified forest and liberate a strategic village from Russian occupation. But the farther they advance through their destroyed homeland, the more they realize that this war may never end.
Surrounded by mines and only accessible through a tiny sliver of wooded land that is fought over meter by meter, the village of Andriivka, Ukraine, lies in ruins. Following 20 DAYS IN MARIUPOL (IFFBoston 2023), Ukrainian director and journalist Mstyslav Chernov returns with a stunning portrayal of life in the trenches, and in the battle for this one small place, the desperate struggle against Russia to free the Ukrainian nation. In this picture of total war—from the command centers leading the soldiers to the funerals for those who lost their lives and the brutal combat by people who only a few years ago were civilians—Chernov has created a remarkable film about the terrible beauty in liberating one’s home while also unflinchingly looking at the futility and horror of war itself.
—Sudeep Sharma, Sundance Film Festival guide