As an accomplished Colorado mountaineer with a resumé that included scaling rugged peaks in Tibet, Nepal, India, South America and Europe, Jordan Campbell was well acquainted with the term “objective dangers.” In the parlance of mountaineers, those are natural events over which climbers have no control, such as rockfall, that can cost them their lives.
Campbell, a University of Colorado grad who lives in Ridgway, faced other kinds of potentially fatal risks beyond his control — cluster bombs, missiles, artillery fire — on multiple trips to Ukraine since 2022 as a conflict journalist. He survived to produce a 40-minute documentary film, “Ukraine Under Fire: A film about War & Resilience,” which had its premiere in Washington last month to mark the three-year anniversary of the Russian invasion.
His main character did not survive, however. Peter Fouché, a South African drawn to Ukraine to serve as a combat medic, was killed in action near the front lines last June, three weeks before film production was finished. Campbell calls him the hero of the film.
“He was this rough and tumble guy, originally a police officer from South Africa, then a cab driver in London, who gave up everything to serve in Ukraine,” Campbell said. “Peter was killed by the Russians by multiple drones. He’s been written up in the BBC. He looked like Jean-Claude Van Damme. Just an exceptional, heroic figure.”
Campbell’s post-mountaineering second career as a filmmaker has taken him to Nepal, Kosovo, Lebanon, Cameroon, South Sudan, Libya and Iraq. In the early days of the Ukraine war he reached out to a Ukrainian friend, Iryna Karagan, an elite Himalayan mountaineer whom he’d met through climbing circles.
“I said, ‘I’m really concerned, you‘ve got to get out of the country,’” said Campbell, 57. “She said, ‘No, we’re going to stay here and we’re going to fight. I’m building Molotov cocktails in my basement.’ I booked a ticket within 24 hours. That’s where the film about ‘war and resilience’ started in my head.”
In Ukraine, Campbell embedded with emergency medical teams and took his cameras into military hospitals. He toured abandoned, bombed-out cities and rode in ambulances through the streets of Kostyantynivka, where he experienced the impact of cluster bombs on civilian areas. Fouché took him to positions near the frontline in the Eastern Donbas region, where Fouché describes Ukraine’s invaders as “Russian genocidal maniacs.”
Another central figure in the film is Olga Butko, a Ukrainian television news anchor who partners with Campbell to tell the story of her homeland under siege, describing the tragedy in heartbreaking detail. In one scene she takes him to her childhood home, which her parents fled when Russian artillery drew close.
“I’m trying not to hate, so basically it’s anger,” Butko says of her emotional struggle. “This war is just because one country, for more than 100 years, they just don’t want us to exist. You can call it genocide. … Raping, torturing, massive graves. What is this?”
In a particularly dramatic scene, Fouché and Campbell hear the sound of cluster-bomb explosions nearby. Soon after, they encounter the body of a farmer who was killed in that attack.
“I don’t know which is more prevalent in this war — soldiers being killed or war crimes being committed,” Fouché says with a tremor in his voice. “Schools have been bombed, hospitals have been bombed. There are jets flying over you daily, dropping cluster munitions on residential areas. … People are dying in the thousands, soldiers coming home without faces and limbs and hands. Children being brutally gang-raped and then beaten to death in front of their parents.
“The West will be remembered for what they have done, and not done, in this war.”
Campbell’s film, edited by Michael Herbener of Westminster, had its premiere at George Washington University’s Lisner Auditorium in Washington on Feb. 24. The Ukrainian ambassador, Oksana Markarova, spoke at the event, as did Mark Dillen, executive director of Ukrainians of Colorado. Butko flew in from Ukraine.
The next day, Campbell said, Markarova sent a message to the Ukrainian foreign ministry recommending that the film be used by Ukrainian diplomatic missions worldwide.
Now Campbell is seeking financial backing to fund distribution of the film to a mass audience. He got a boost this week when the Ouray International Film Festival announced that he will be honored at this year’s festival, receiving its “Film in Action” award. He will present the film there on June 19.
Campbell acknowledges there are similarities in calculating risk avoidance in mountaineering, versus filming near the front lines of a war, but there’s one fundamental difference. Mountaineers climb primarily for their own sense of fulfillment. Helping the world see suffering and evil up close comes from a humanitarian impulse.
“Going back to my first Himalayan trip in 1992, I saw a lot of underserved people who were on the edge of life,” Campbell said. “In 2002, when I went to Tibet, I saw tons of people who lacked access to health care, a humanitarian crisis. I also saw the political occupation of the Chinese over the Tibetans. Risk tolerance is part of it, but because of those expeditions, you see the world from a lens of, ‘Wow, there’s so much need.’
“And, when you see something turn into an injustice like Ukraine, it really gets under your ribcage.”
