(Kyiv) Ukraine woke up Monday still at war – Russian drones destroyed buildings in the Kharkiv and Odessa regions – but also to the news that the country had won its first Hollywood Oscar.
The Oscar for best documentary feature film awarded to 20 days in Mariupol by Mstyslav Tchernov, the Associated Press journalist’s poignant first-person account of the early days of Russia’s invasion in 2022, is still a bittersweet victory for Ukrainians.
“This is the first Oscar in the history of Ukraine and I am honored,” said an emotional Mstyslav Tchernov on Sunday evening during the ceremony in Los Angeles. I am probably the first director on this stage to say that I wish I had never made this film: rather than receiving this Oscar, I would have preferred that Russia had never attacked Ukraine. »
In his native Ukraine, on Monday morning, people rejoiced at the award given to this work which exposed to the whole world the brutal devastation of this war.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said he was grateful to the team and thanked journalists around the world who are still covering the conflict despite a decline in media attention, as this war enters its third year and the world’s attention has turned to the Middle East.
“The horrors of Mariupol must never be forgotten,” the president wrote on social media. The whole world must see and remember what the inhumane Russian invasion did to our people. Towns and villages were destroyed, homes were burned, and entire families were killed by Russian shells and buried in their own yards. »
The Associated Press team of journalist Tchernov, photojournalist Evgeniy Maloletka and producer Vasilisa Stepanenko arrived in Mariupol in February 2022 an hour before Russia began bombing the port city.
Two weeks later, they were the last journalists working for an international media outlet in the city, sending crucial dispatches to the outside world that showed civilian casualties of all ages, mass graves dug, the bombing of a maternity ward and the scale of devastation.
The documentary was co-produced by the AP news agency and the public affairs program Frontline of the American public television network PBS.
One of the film’s key characters, police officer Volodymyr Nikulin, helped the team cover up and ultimately escape Mariupol as Russian forces closed in on the city.
“This film showed that we can defend our country, that we are united,” he told the AP from Kyiv on Monday. And at this moment, if the world sees our struggle, the crimes that the aggressor is committing in our country, how he is destroying our cities, I believe that the world will support our efforts, and that will be decisive. »
Ukraine’s human rights chief, Dmytro Lubinets, praised the documentary for showing “the truth to the whole world.”
“This gala is an opportunity to address millions of people. This is what the director did by discussing the occupation, prisoners of war, the murder of Ukrainians by Russia and the illegal kidnapping of civilians,” he wrote on Telegram.
This Oscar, one of several awards won by the documentary, including the Pulitzer, comes as Ukrainian forces and munitions run out and Russian troops attempt to move deeper into the western part of the region from Donetsk, held by Ukraine, and to penetrate the Kharkiv region, to the north.
This is the second consecutive Oscar awarded to a documentary that shed harsh light on Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Last year, Navalnyabout Russian opposition leader Alexeï Navalny, who died in February in prison, also won the Oscar for best documentary feature film.
reference: www.lapresse.ca