Rating: NR | Runtime: 107 minutes
Release Date: July 23rd, 2025 (Ukraine) / July 25th, 2025 (USA)
Studio: PBS Distribution
Director(s): Mstyslav Chernov
Writer(s): Mstyslav Chernov

I don’t know why we came here.

Between this and 20 Days in Mariupol, few are doing what director Mstyslav Chernov is as far as filming from the front lines of an ongoing war. I don’t think 2000 Meters to Andriivka is as effective a documentary as that Oscar-winner, but I cannot deny its potency as a first-hand account of what has been lost due to Russia’s act of aggression and the world’s waning interest. Not just the lives and the cities, but the hope that Ukraine will survive at all.

Besides some expository drone shots from above and contextual footage of funerals and base camps, the majority of the film is captured by helmet cameras during firefights. Chernov embeds himself with Fedya Courier as he prepares to fly the blue and yellow upon reclaiming Andriivka in the nation’s 2023 counter-offensive while other battalions gradually win back land from the Russians that have remained. 2000 meters away. 1000. 600. 300. Andriivka.

I wish the harrowing nature of its vérité style was enough to keep me engaged, but the violence constantly being fed to us this past decade has numbed me like so many others. The fact I was watching real people die on-camera wasn’t enough to stop the onslaught from becoming monotonous. The point is, of course, to not see these men as numbers. To see their faces and understand their individuality, courage, and dreams. But it inevitably becomes a laundry list of the dead.

Even so, it’s objectively important, will probably earn Chernov another Oscar, and stands as a reminder of Putin’s evil. Could it also reinvigorate public attention by revealing all this carnage was in service of securing a decimated village that has since been taken by Russia again? Maybe. I do, however, fear it’s too late. If true, the film becomes even more important as evidence that Ukraine existed. That its people gave their lives for it. That small victories do matter.

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A scene from 2000 METERS TO ANDRIIVKA; courtesy of PBS.