CASUALTY OF WAR

Award-Winning Documentary Filmmaker Reporter Killed ‘Trying to Leave Mariupol’

Mantas Kvedaravicius, a Lithuanian whose film ‘Mariupolis’ premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2016, was 45.

Mantas Kvedaravicius, a Lithuanian documentary filmmaker, has reportedly been killed in the southern Ukrainian port city of Mariupol. The country’s defense ministry said Sunday that the documentarian had been killed by invading Russian forces while “trying to leave” the city. Kvedaravicius was 45. Russian film director Vitaly Mansky mourned his colleague’s death, saying on Facebook that Kvedaravicius had died “with a camera in his hands,” trying to capture a “shitty war of evil, against the whole world.” The Lithuanian was best-known for his documentary Mariupolis, a chronicle of everyday life in Mariupol under siege that premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2016. “It is not about war,” Kvedaravicius said in a 2016 interview, “but about life next to war and lived in spite of war.”