Top films of 2025 in the UK: No. 2 – 2000 Meters to Andriivka | culture

TTwo thousand meters is just over a mile, roughly the length of the Kentucky Derby, or 25 blocks in New York City — a quick drive, a reasonable stroll, and a distance that’s largely within the realm of human understanding. Which makes the 2,000 meters to Andriivka, Ukrainian director Mstislav Chernov’s follow-up to the Oscar-winning 20 Days in Mariupol, all the more incredible. Here, on this short, wooded strip of land in late 2023, Ukrainian soldiers fought their way into the abandoned one-street town — supposedly a key point in the Russian supply line — and fought off Russian artillery fire, snipers and air attacks. Progress that usually takes about 10 minutes takes several weeks to be fatal.

In both a feat of filmmaking and front-line reporting – at the time, Chernov was almost the only documentarian on the front line of a conflict riddled with Russian propaganda and disinformation – we experience the 2,000 Meters to Andreevka as soldiers do: inch by inch, meter by meter, a senseless barrage of carnage from seemingly everything everywhere at once, a fever dream of World War I-style trenches and a modern, drone dystopia. Chernov seamlessly weaves together soldiers’ bodycam footage—shocking first-person windows into the horror and fog of war—and his own recordings, included with the 3rd Assault Brigade in Ukraine during what turned out to be a largely disappointing counteroffensive. Chernov managed to capture several soldiers, most of them boys in their twenties who had other plans before the large-scale Russian invasion, in moments of pause or thought, in breaks from hard work. For many, this is their last record.

If that sounds unwatchable, well, yes, the 2000 meters to Andreevka is almost unspeakably devastating. I’ve never left a movie more mentally and physically hurt than after watching these men who, in another timeline, would be off to college or starting their careers and families, men the same age as my still-childish brother — and from spending a full 106 minutes bracing for impact. But it is astonishing filmmaking—as a document of the war of the 2020s, as a record of what really happened, as a memorial to who and what was lost, and as a testament to the courage of the Ukrainian resistance and the futility of this battle in the first place.

Often, in the months since I first saw the film – while much of the international community has accepted a certain level of permanence of the Russian invasion – in the fear Chernov expresses at the end of the film: “The longer the war lasts, the less people will care about it.” There seems to be some terrible and sad truth to that. But the 2,000 meters to Andreevka ensures that, as pyrrhic and intractable as the conflict now appears to be, the details will be remembered.