You are listening to The Next Best Picture podcast, and this is my interview of the director for 2,000 meters to Andriefka.

Mistislav Chernov.

Ukrainian forces have now launched their much-talked-about counter-offensive.

Counter-offensive, expected to be the biggest military operation of Europe since World War II....and Hello, everyone. Hello everyone and welcome to the Next Best Picture podcast where I'm being joined right now by the director of 2,000 meters to Andrifka, Mitzislav Chernov.

Academy Award winner, might I add, Mastislav Chernov. Welcome back to the show, sir.

Thank you for inviting me.

So I want to first stop by asking, when 20 days of Mario Pole has this award season run, gets all this worldwide exposure for you and for what you're highlighting, obviously, in the ongoing war in Ukraine, does something like that move the needle? Do you see any kind of positive impact from any, you know, the level of exposure that film was able to get?

Wow, straight to the, straight to the point, straight to the hard point.

Look, I think, I think just as a starting point, hoping to have a positive impact with your film

or with your reporting is it's a very good place to

start. But sooner or later, filmmakers, journalists, especially in the times of turmoil like

right now, will face the disappointment of not doing enough and not having enough impact. Even with a huge success

of 20 days in Marupil, even with millions of people who saw it and whose opinions may have

changed, who saw the truth about the invasion, the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Russia in Ukraine,

you know, the place where we are right now is still not very good. Things are worse since then.

Yeah. So in short term, I don't see a result. That being said, let's say, history is not always what happened.

History is what we remember, right? So, recording the history, whether we're talking about 20 days

in Mariupil and war crimes, or 2,000 meters to Andrievka, our new film, and recording

the experience of the experience of Ukrainian soldiers on the front line in 2023.

All that must be recorded as truthful, as realistic as possible, because as time passes

with all the noise, with all the distortion of the information

that is happening around us, with all the generative AI, with the fake news, all of this

...