Two thousand metres. On an ordinary day, it is a distance that could be walked in less than half an hour. In 2000 Meters to Andriivka, those two kilometres become almost unimaginable. Every few metres can require hours of waiting, crawling, fighting and fear; every tree may conceal an enemy position; every advance may cost a life. By reducing a vast war to one brutally difficult journey through a forest, Ukrainian filmmaker and journalist Mstyslav Chernov creates one of the most immersive documentaries to emerge from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Chernov previously directed 20 Days in Mariupol, the devastating account of the siege of Mariupol that won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. His second feature moves away from civilians trapped inside a besieged city and towards the soldiers fighting on the front line. The perspective has changed, but his approach remains uncompromising: there is little distance between the camera and the reality it records.
| Film Title | Movie Details |
|---|---|
| Country | Ukraine |
| Year | 2025 |
| Genre | Documentary / War |
| Runtime | 107 min |
| Director | Mstyslav Chernov |
| Cinematography | Mstyslav Chernov, Alex Babenko |
| Editor | Michelle Mizner |
The documentary takes place during the 2023 Ukrainian counteroffensive. Chernov and fellow Associated Press journalist Alex Babenko accompany soldiers from Ukraine’s 3rd Assault Brigade as they attempt to reach and retake the small Russian-occupied village of Andriivka, near Bakhmut. Between them and the village lies approximately two kilometres of heavily fortified forest.
That simple geographical fact provides the film with its entire structure.
A number appears on screen indicating the remaining distance: 1,800 metres, 1,600, 1,400… The numbers decrease, but the journey never seems to become easier. Instead, they give physical meaning to something that news reports about territorial advances can easily obscure. A few hundred metres on a military map may look insignificant. On the ground, those same metres contain trenches, mines, destroyed trees, drones, artillery and human bodies.
Chernov places us frighteningly close to the soldiers making that journey. His own footage is combined with body-camera recordings from Ukrainian troops, producing images that are sometimes chaotic and extremely difficult to watch. The camera runs through trenches, disappears into vegetation and enters positions only moments after fighting has taken place.
There is no cinematic distance from the violence.
And yet 2000 Meters to Andriivka is not powerful simply because of its access to combat. Images from body cameras could easily have turned the documentary into something resembling an action film, especially for audiences accustomed to seeing war represented through fictional cinema and video games. Chernov repeatedly works against that possibility.
There is nothing exciting about what we are watching.
Combat is confusing, exhausting and frightening. Soldiers frequently cannot see the people shooting at them. Decisions are made in seconds with incomplete information. A patch of forest that has taken enormous effort to capture can appear visually indistinguishable from the one before it.
Perhaps most importantly, Chernov allows us to meet the soldiers before we learn what happens to them.
They talk about their families, their fears and the lives they had before the invasion. Many were civilians only a few years earlier. They joke because people continue to joke even in extraordinary circumstances. Some talk about what they will do after the war, while others seem increasingly uncertain that such a future can even be imagined.
The documentary consequently develops a strange relationship with time. The soldiers are moving forward physically, metre by metre, yet there is little sense that the war itself is moving towards an ending.
This becomes one of the film’s most painful ideas.
Andriivka is tiny. Chernov himself described it at Sundance as the story of one very small village while emphasising that there are countless other villages and cities across Ukraine. The enormous sacrifice required to capture such a small piece of territory forces an uncomfortable question: if two kilometres can cost this much, what does an entire war cost?
The answer cannot be expressed through territory alone.
One of the strongest sequences comes not from the battlefield but from what follows it. Funerals remind us that the people we have been watching through helmet cameras are not anonymous soldiers moving across a military map. Chernov gives names and faces to individuals who might otherwise become another number in casualty statistics.
This human dimension distinguishes the documentary from conventional frontline reporting. Chernov is a journalist, and the film retains the immediacy of journalism, but its 107-minute structure allows experiences that would normally appear as isolated news reports to accumulate. Death is followed by another advance. Another advance introduces another soldier. Another soldier becomes someone whose fate we begin to fear.
There is also a haunting contradiction at the centre of the film. The soldiers are attempting to liberate their own country, yet the landscape they recover has been almost completely destroyed in the process. Andriivka becomes less a traditional military objective than a symbol of the terrible logic of war: enormous human effort and sacrifice expended to regain a place that may barely exist by the time it is reached.
Chernov never needs to manufacture a grand heroic moment from this. The soldiers’ courage is evident simply in their willingness to continue moving through the forest.
The filmmaking is remarkably controlled considering the conditions in which much of the material was recorded. Michelle Mizner’s editing is particularly important, bringing together Chernov and Babenko’s journalism, soldiers’ body-camera footage and quieter moments of reflection without making the film feel artificially constructed. Meanwhile, Sam Slater’s score contributes to the growing sense of dread without overwhelming the images.
2000 Meters to Andriivka premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, where Chernov won the Directing Award for World Cinema Documentary. It subsequently received the F:ACT Award at CPH:DOX and further prizes at Ukraine’s Docudays UA.
Ukraine also selected the documentary as its submission for Best International Feature Film at the 98th Academy Awards, although it did not ultimately receive a nomination. It later received a BAFTA nomination for Best Documentary.
Those distinctions recognise an extraordinary piece of documentary filmmaking, but watching 2000 Meters to Andriivka hardly feels like an experience that can be reduced to awards.
What stays with you is the distance.
At the beginning, 2,000 metres sounds almost absurdly small. By the end, our understanding of those metres has completely changed. We have seen the forest, met some of the men trying to cross it and understood something of what each small advance demands.
Chernov cannot make us experience what those soldiers experienced, and the film never pretends that a cinema audience can truly understand the reality of being there. What he can do is destroy the abstraction through which war is so often consumed from afar.
A map might show a line moving forward.
2000 Meters to Andriivka shows us what it takes to move it.
