"20 Days in Mariupol" is definitely the best movie I've ever seen. Despite what is shown in it.
An absolutely not pathetic ode to the human spirit, to ordinary citizens who stay in conditions impossible to live in, just trying to fulfill their only possible mission at the moment: to protect, save, heal, and bury. And, of course, to highlight the crimes of the aggressor. Yes, it is true journalism, as it should be perhaps only in some ideal world — unbiased, fearless, accurate — that conquers here completely and completely.
Despite all the shown deaths, injuries, pain, and sometimes even looting, which the locals resorted to, it turned out that in these terrible circumstances, there is a place for a simple worldly act of bravery. When ten people with rifles in Ukrainian uniforms defend the hospital from tens of thousands of invaders with machine guns, tanks, planes, and bombs — when a decision is made to stand against such a numerical superiority of the enemy, which gives no chance to hold anything or at least save one's own life. But you stand to the last. When in a city surrounded by the enemy you dismantle rubble after bombings and pull people out, because no one will do it except you. When darkness and death creep through your streets, but you try to save at least one more life — and somehow hang on when it doesn't work out. When you're burying hundreds of people a day, because people have to be buried, no matter how horrible they die. Simply because it is necessary so that you continue to remain human. Oh, this is an extraordinary story about people who think they are ordinary.
I want the world not only to see children's deaths recorded on journalistic cameras and to hear the beastly screams of mothers and fathers. I want people who are still under the illusion that there is someone in russia to have a dialogue with, to see that this is not putin's war against Ukraine. This is the war of a bloody regime, which has closely grown together with the people who support it. And this war is going against the whole civilized world. Yes, the war was generally unleashed by the russian political elite, but it is not them that is personally shooting from tanks at the windows of residential buildings — an average russian soldier is definitely sitting in that tank.
And although the film is not about that, it is not putin who personally tortures prisoners of war, it is not him who commits violence and massacres in Ukrainian cities by his own hands, it is not him who supports his children in response to cheerful reports about how they are robbed, tortured and killed Ukrainians. All this is done by russians, whose brains, inflamed by centuries of enmity with the whole world and Ukrainians in particular, centuries of wrongs inflicted by them and to them by their authorities, centuries of living in the paradigm of a sick, lying national myth, do not perceive another form of state. They have only one way — a long purification due to the decline and disintegration to dozens of state entities. Full immersion in the chaos that they sow in Ukraine and seek to sow in the world. And this is the only possibility for the survival of our people and our state, which are the complete antithesis of russian society. This is not necessary for revenge, because no tribute and no funds will cover the losses we suffered in this war, in previous wars, in the endless genocide that the russians have been committing against the Ukrainian people for centuries. But in order to stop those who bring this terrible darkness into the world under the screams and cries of Ukrainian mothers.
I want the darkness to dissipate. And I fully support those who do not spare themselves to carry the light of truth. This is not the time to spare ourselves if we must already stop this disaster. Thanks to Humans…
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