Mstyslav Chernov/Sundance Institute
MOVIE REVIEW
2000 Meters to Andriivka (2025)
The documentary “2000 Meters to Andriivka” takes its Sundance Film Festival audience back to the 2023 Ukrainian counteroffensive against invading Russian forces, an operation with mixed results now recorded in the books and which even at the time seemed likely to turn into grinding costly warfare. That description looks like a light euphemism while watching Mstyslav Chernov’s documentary, built around first-person footage from body-mounted cameras worn by Ukrainian soldiers and by Mr. Chernov, embedded in their brigade and coming under as much fire as the rest of them. The military goal is the strategic village of Andriivka, approached via a dead-straight strip of charred forest between two large and deeply cratered mine fields; not the last time that the film’s visuals have an aura of the fictional about them, the harshest battlefield a production designer could concoct. A Ukrainian soldier himself says it’s “like another planet.” But this is all humans at work.