Filmmaker Mantas Kvedaravičius was far away when the War in Ukraine broke out. He decided to return to Mariupol, the town that he had majestically shot in the past, in 2014-2015. He gathered new images, then he was arrested and shot. Close collaborators finalized the film in his stead, thus resulting in a troubling testimony to a fair gaze, that knew how to avoid the pitfalls of abjection and sensationalism.

In a recent analysis of the visual productions that arrive to us from the Ukrainian frontlines, I declared myself as being in favor of fragments and opposed to totality, which I perceived as being oppressive and indecent. Totality – vast landscapes of destruction, kept alive by those peddling suffering – was the attribute of mass-media, and was to be duly counter-attacked by forms (documentaries either artistic or informative) that would invest other temporalities and other devices, more ethical ones, of exposing and denouncing atrocity. Because (and it bears repeating) this was not about hiding evil – but arranging it in a system that also takes the unseen side of things into account. I remain of the opinion that many of us, civilians comfortably living in the civilized world of consumerism, will never be able to truly understand what this war had meant to the inhabitants of Mariupol. But Mantas Kvedaravičius’ film can offer us a few precious hints.

Mariupolis 2 is a powerful work, in a way that the current era of hypervisibility has rendered obsolete: that of a document that risks everything in the name of information. Because the siege of Mariupol effectively blocked all news and because the filmmaker tried to create a breach through which they could still nonetheless pass, this film is both emotional and a rallying cry. As if the war would have produced a crater of anachronism in the stream of news, which would endanger the very occupation of “taking pictures” and, thus, automatically ennobling through this outdated belief in the ardent necessity of the image. It must be said that, while clocking in at almost two hours, Mariupolis 2 is a long and repetitive film, which, due to its style of editing – which is more like a simple back-to-back run through its raw material –, ends up dangerously close to canceling out its indignant message, when the monotony of the shots doesn’t even rhyme with the inevitable monotony of life under siege anymore. But it is not this clumsiness that matters – but rather, it’s the things that the exaggerated charity of the edit allows us to see. It’s the same things that Mantas Kvedaravičius himself has seen, who wanted to film them in the name of memory – just like the things that he turned his gaze away from, which are also symptomatic nonetheless. Pieced together, the two sketch the portrait of a remarkable author/reporter, cautious without making things palatable, precise without being indecent, and capable of supple directorial gestures that are increasingly rare nowadays.

The Lithuanian film is similar to all that we have gotten to see on television – drone shots of destroyed neighborhoods, smoldering buildings, or streets obliterated by explosions –, but in an opposite way. To arrive at a summit – at a point where the Azovstal factory is visible in the distance –, Kvedaravičius had to go to considerable lengths. To film a shot of a destroyed street, Kvedaravičius must leave his shelter behind and put his life in danger. There is all the difference in the world between a non-human drone that is piloted from a distance and an object – the film – for which these images are still valuable, still the result of work. Additionally, the film’s length sets it in a league of its own: just see the director’s repeated incursions at a height, in which we see successive similar shots of the city, shot from out of a sickly, almost hypnotic fascination. We’ve all seen these kinds of images, but they were either frozen (amateur photos) or too fast (TV reportages trudging on impassibly). Here, we’re in the chamber of a time that flows like molasses, when the silence of dawn is just as bad of a sign just as the sound siege of the afternoon. I have never had such a clear realization of the fact that, beyond the mutilation of the urban landscape, the Ukrainian war has just as severely modified the auditive markup of routine: various sounds, all of them terrifying, populate the film’s off-screen with an almost unlikely sort of rhythmicity as if it were added in post-production. This is cinema’s renowned advantage in the face of photography: to bathe us in real-time. In Kvedaravičius’ film, time is an insidious entity, that one cannot escape.

There are also moments when, shooting quickly and constrained by the context, the filmmaker seems to have a touch of grace. These people who are sweeping the courtyard of a baptist church, using improvised brooms, with the camera lingering on the dust combined with fine shards of glass that are swept aside, is one of the most powerful images of the war that I have ever known: a gesture so illogical and precarious, that still proves the need for perseverance in preparing the present day, a still lively pleasure in creating beauty – a shot whose force renders it capable of becoming a metaphor. Or the scene in which two people recover a generator from a bombed-out house and pass it over the bodies of civilians that are lying face-down. Or this man swearing at the current Ukrainian political class while taking care of his soup, boiling under the open sky. Due to obvious reasons, Kvedaravičius no longer had any freedom in his movements, but even so, he managed to transform sparks of the day into the prime matter of a tragic, burlesque cinema, and this spectral city, reduced to but a few besieged souls, in an autonomous community, whose evolution the film manages to trace poetically. Mariupolis 2 does not shy away from displaying violence – but seen from the perspective of one who is on the ground (a citizen caught amid a senseless war), it gains the shine of a mute terror, and of a hope that is difficult to extinguish. A phenomenal emotion runs through these shots, ready to make us forget all the obscene footage that has all too often portrayed the reality of the war in Ukraine.

Victor Morozov

Film critic and journalist; writes regularly for Dilema Veche and Scena9. Doing a MA film theory programme in Paris.