On Jan. 20, Utah hosts the Sundance Film Festival, where the documentary “20 Days in Mariupol” will be premiered.

The debut film by the Kharkiv journalist, photographer, and director Mstyslav Chernov shows how Mariupol experienced the first weeks of a full-scale Russian invasion: the first shelling, cold nights without light and heating, the bombardment of the maternity hospital, burned-out windows of high-rise buildings.

The film was nominated for the World Cinema Documentary Competition, where it will compete for the award with the remaining 11 films from around the world. Among them is another Ukrainian film – “Iron Butterflies” by Roman Liubyi about the MH17 tragedy in 2014, which will be screened at the Berlinale.

The materials for the documentary were collected by journalists from the Associated Press news agency — Mstyslav Chernov, Yevhen Maloletka, and Vasylisa Stepanenko. They arrived in Mariupol on the night of Feb. 24, a few hours before the first sounds of the full-scale war.

“This is an emotionally difficult but important historical document, an event for Ukrainian documentary cinema and one of the first full-length documentaries about the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine,” Chernov writes on his Facebook page.

The film “20 Days in Mariupol” will be available to watch online on Jan. 24 and 30.

Earlier, Kharkiv theater group Slovo presented the play “Mothermotherland” based on the novel “I (Romance)” by Mykola Khvylovyi at the Kennedy Center in Washington.