Twenty days in Mariupol does not deceive. It is a painful documentary, “but it must be painful to watch,” the voice-over warns. And if someone has the idea of ??doing it with a bucket of popcorn, the drops of blood will end up coloring the cornflakes. Does it leave a bad body? Naturally. Can a spectator expect anything else when some journalists place him – without physical risk, unlike them – before twenty days of siege on a normal city whose inhabitants are subjected to a macabre lottery about who will die and who will not?
The war in Ukraine is exactly this. Disoriented people, disbelieving at first, with unexciting lives in a Soviet urban landscape, where all the streets and all the buildings are carbon copies, whether in Mariupol, in the south of Ukraine, or in Vladivostok, so close to Japan. Russia longs for Mariupol – “a trophy” – and day by day it is achieving its goal at a price whose pocket change is these lives cut short, like the two legs that Ilya, 16, loses because he was playing soccer with his friends in the wrong place. of the inopportune moment. He didn’t even remain mutilated, and there his father mourns him in a hospital hallway where there is no time to waste. And so the entire documentary, pure reality, with no other plot than some bombs here, some dead there and a lot of misfortune. There are no special effects or extras. Little dialogue, the essential one. “In war, good people become more good, bad people become more evil,” says one surgeon. The bombs fall, they don’t distinguish. We have to see it? It would not be just in case.
