Speaking after receiving a Freedom Fighter Award from the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), Chernov, who won an Oscar for 20 days in Mariupol, said there would be an intense battle to tell the story of the war and the truth must prevail.
“It is challenging to talk about the importance of art or cinema because we have very limited power to change the events; we cannot stop missiles, we cannot stop bullets,” he said. “What art can do, what cinema can do, is to defend the truth because when the war is over, and every war someday will be over, another battle will start, the battle for truth, the battle for justice.”
Speaking in a message recorded on the frontline in Ukraine and played to a CEPA Honors Gala in Washington, Chernov said he and other filmmakers, artists and journalists will try to ensure everyone knows the facts about the war, which started in 2014 and was stepped up by Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022.
“We will keep on going,” he said. “We will keep working, and hopefully we will all be alive.”
Moscow has engaged in a relentless propaganda operation to try to convince the world that the invasion was the fault of Ukraine and the West, and Chernov warned that the battle will intensify.
“Everyone will try to rewrite history according to their beliefs and according to what they want,” he said. “Artists, historians, writers and cinematographers, everyone, will be fighting to preserve the reality; everyone will be fighting to preserve that justice we’ve all been fighting for.”
Ola Rondiak, an artist who has kept working in her studio in Kyiv throughout the war, said art transcends borders and time and can ensure the stories of Ukrainians are remembered and shared.
She told the story of her grandmother, who used a fishbone as a needle, thread from her clothes, and a potato sack as canvas, to secretly embroider religious icons in a Soviet gulag.
“She used art to preserve something those who imprisoned her wanted to erase, her Ukrainian identity; that is why art matters so deeply during a war,” Rondiak said. “Art protects what war tries to destroy, it documents what others want forgotten, and perhaps most importantly it carries stories from one generation to the next and one country to another.”
Rondiak, whose son is fighting in the war, said Chernov’s films have brought the reality of the conflict to people around the world, and showed “something of what it means” to live through a time of war.
“His work, like my grandmother’s embroidery, reminds us that telling the story is itself an act of resistance,” she said. “Across Ukraine, artists continue to create and document what is happening around them, through their work, Ukrainian artists across disciplines demonstrate their resilience and determination to be heard.”
Thomas Penny is an editor and writer based in London. He has worked for local, national, and international news organizations, including the Mail on Sunday, the Daily Telegraph, Bloomberg News, and CEPA, and is now a freelance specializing in international relations, politics, and conflict.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
