Mariupol siege documentary breaks box office records in Ukraine on opening weekend

During the first weekend of its release, the film by Pulitzer Prize-winning director Mstyslav Chernov grossed UAH 531,551 ($14,471).

The film is based on video footage shot by Ukrainian journalists Mstyslav Chernov, a videographer, Evgeniy Maloletka, a photographer, and Vasylysa Stepanenko, a producer, who were members of an Associated Press news team.

They were the only international journalists who stayed in the besieged Mariupol and recorded Russian atrocities in the city. Their live footage made headlines around the world, telling of the tragedy unfolding in the city: the deaths of children, mass graves, a bombed-out maternity hospital and other horrors of Russian crimes.

The team, which arrived in Mariupol a few hours before the full-scale invasion, managed to leave the city 20 days later through the green corridor and took all the filmed footage with them.

The film had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Audience Award. The Los Angeles Times called the work "agonizing and essential."

The documentary can be watched in cinemas in Kyiv, Bila Tserkva, Vyshneve, Vinnytsia, Zhytomyr, Dnipro, Kryvyi Rih, Zaporizhzhya, Lutsk, Lviv, Odesa, Poltava, Rivne, Kharkiv, Sumy, Uzhhorod, Khmelnytskyi, and Cherkasy.