Chernov’s work has garnered numerous awards – including a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the siege of the port city of Mariupol that began in March 2022 – but he’s had to adjust downwards his sense of what journalism can achieve.

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His film is essentially a catalogue of dispatches from the front lines in the first 20 days of a siege that would ultimately last for 86, tied together with his gentle and weary narration (fellow photographer Evgeniy Maloletka is credited as co-cameraman). But it is also an account of the tension inherent in the game he finds himself in – chasing the most brutally revealing images in the hope they will convey something of the lived horror of the moment, in the hope that the world will see, be moved, and react to stop that horror, all the while knowing that probably won’t happen at all.

“That is something I really wanted to represent in the film too, a part of the feeling that I have, and a lot of my colleagues are having right now, of frustration at our inability to influence or to change things for the better,” he says.

“You can’t stop a bullet with a camera. It feels like you’re useless at times, when you see children dying, and you’re just there to film that, and then things become worse, they don’t become better. That frustration, I really wanted to express.”

But in Mariupol, a whole new tension emerged with shocking clarity for the first time: the battle between documentary evidence such as that captured by him and others and the misinformation spread by Russia.

In the early days of the campaign, Russia insisted only military sites were being targeted. Chernov and others had clear evidence of apartment blocks, schools, hospitals being relentlessly shelled. The shocking attack on a maternity hospital – images of a pregnant woman being carried away, bleeding, on a stretcher (she later died) went viral – was framed by Russia as a piece of Hollywood-style theatre, peopled with actors and tricked up with prosthetics.

Never had the need for images from the front been greater, but never had the resistance to accepting them been higher.

“I wanted to preserve examples of these false narratives that emerged around Mariupol,” says Chernov. “I think Mariupol was actually the beginning and the first example of these large-scale false narratives that we’re now seeing everywhere. The story of Mariupol is also a story of misinformation. It’s just inseparable now.”

That his footage made it out was, he says, “a miracle”. That the film has found an audience and is in contention for the big prize is another. But the real campaign remains the one on the ground, one that remains all-consuming even if the world’s attention has drifted from it.

“Ukrainians will definitely keep fighting because they know what happens if cities get occupied,” says Chernov. “People get tortured, arrested, stripped of their Ukrainian identity, and killed. So they fight for survival, they fight for their freedom, and these are not just abstract words, these are very real fights that are happening.”

And the fight, he believes, extends well beyond his country’s borders. “If Russia wins this war, that will be a signal to all other countries in other parts of the world that they can do whatever they want and it will go unnoticed and unpunished,” he says. “And that is dangerous for the whole world.”

20 Days in Mariupol will stream exclusively on DocPlay from March 11. Mstyslav Chernov will appear at the Australian International Documentary Conference (AIDC) at ACMI in Melbourne, March 3-6, with a free public screening of his film at 6.30pm on Monday March 4. Details: aidc.com.au The 96th Academy Awards are on March 10 (US time; March 11 Australia), broadcast on 7 and 7Plus.