11/08/2023
An entire cinema filled with spectators was stunned after the screening of the film "20 Days in Mariupol". The horrors of a war that is so close in terms of geography and time, came brutally alive through the documentary film that was screened this Thursday evening at Lumbardhi Bahçe.
Mstyslav Chernov's film follows the chronological course of the atrocities that occur in the 20 days of the war, as Russian forces want to take the city. The days follow each other as inhumanity overcomes the limits of the unimaginable.
For anyone, it was impossible not to follow the developments of that spring either through foreign or local media. The film is a summary, a testimony given in sound and image of all those atrocities. The journalist team with videos and writings unfolded the stories, through which the world could learn what was being done to civilians in Mariupol.
The narrator shares his personal experience. After visiting hell, he was able to get out of there alive, but in that hell, he saw with his own eyes how the lives of newborn babies, and pregnant mothers, how the hearts of children, stopped beating while their parents screamed and no one heard them.
Mass graves with gravediggers digging and digging to bury the dead of an apocalyptic situation.
It is impossible to single out which scene of this documentary is the most gruesome. The documentary is ghastly, so it was chosen not to say anything. Not even at the end of it, maybe to honor the killed, maybe from the shock they experienced, maybe because for a few moments everyone thought that while clapping their hands, nothing can undo the monstrous crimes that happened…
By: Ana Haxhimali
Photo: Malda Lika
