Oscar Predictions 2024: Who will win the Best Documentary Feature Film?

The American magazine Variety says 20 Days in Mariupol is “too important to ignore” and we agree that it might bag the Best Documentary Feature Film Award at the 96th Academy Awards to take place at the Dolby Theatre at Ovation Hollywood, LA, on March 10, to be aired at 7 pm on ABC (at 4 am on March 11 in India).

Last year, the poisoning of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s most prominent domestic foe Alexei Navalny was the topic of Daniel Roher’s documentary Navalny, which began filming after he came out of a coma and continued until his January 2021 arrest. The film won the audience award at Sundance Film Festival and went on to win the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature, beating India’s All That Breathes by Shaunak Sen, among the nominees. A year later, last month, in a tragic turn of events, Navalny died in the Arctic prison. In that context, and with the Directors Guild of America Award, Sundance World Cinema Documentary Competition award, and BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) Award in hand, 20 Days in Mariupol, directed by Ukrainian filmmaker Mstyslav Chernov, and produced by Michelle Mizner and Raney Aronson-Rath, is “too important to ignore.” The film was selected as the Ukrainian submission for the Best International Feature Film at the 96th Academy Awards, but was not nominated in this category; the film was, however, nominated for the Best Documentary Feature Award.

The film, which can be watched on Prime Video, tells the story of the 20 days Chernov spent with his colleagues in besieged Mariupol after Russia began its invasion of his country. Chernov compiled footage that he collected in Mariupol together with the team from Frontline and the Associated Press (AP). An AP team of Ukrainian journalists — the only international reporters who remained in the city as Russian forces closed in — trapped in the besieged city of Mariupol struggle to continue their work documenting atrocities of the Russian invasion: dying children, mass graves, the bombing of a maternity hospital, and more. The prospects for an end of Russia’s war on Ukraine remain bleak.