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Chris Parry It’s a guy from Cornwall. He loves adventure and takes risks. War breaks out in Ukraine In February 2022, he was overcome by a deep sense of compassion that led him to help those who were terrorized and homeless. PutinArmy. This ultimately cost him his life at the age of 28 in the “grey zone”. Eastern UkraineA desolate no-man’s land. We rarely hear of British and other foreigners volunteering as humanitarian workers in Ukraine. Hell Jumper Helljumpers, available on BBC Two and iPlayer, tells the story of Chris’s short life, explaining their experiences, motivations, courage and the service they rendered to their fellow humans. No one forced Chris or any of the other ‘Helljumpers’ to fight in this war – it’s time we honour them.
Young Chris is said to be a sociable, intelligent, and athletic guy with a zest for life—swimming, go-karting, and tree climbing almost from the womb. He would almost certainly have made a good soldier, though he has never touched a gun, and never carries one when we see him running around Ukraine trying to rescue people who were left behind when the Russians advanced. Often, these people were too old, too weak, or too stubborn to leave the unlit, unheated basements of bombed-out apartment buildings. In total, we learn that Chris personally rescued around 400 people, and we can be sure that few would have survived the occupation.
Why did he do it? His parents, Rob and Kristen, noticed that although he had never paid attention to the news, he began to follow the reports on TV about the atrocities during the chaotic period in Ukraine. They said to Chris, “You can’t just sit there and let this happen and not help others.”
Chris ignores official advice to stay away from Russia, lies to his parents about how dangerous his job is, and becomes the bravest man alive, taking on evacuation missions that no one else wants to touch, where he gets too close to the Russians and is vulnerable to stray bullets or grenades fired by the ubiquitous drones.
Hell Jumper is a new kind of documentary, in that it draws on a lot of Chris’s self-filmed footage, plus some text and voice messages and social media posts (especially Instagram). These are cleverly blended with more traditional testimonies from friends and family, and news archives. We don’t hear the voices of generals or politicians; we hear only the voices of carpenters or workshop workers from around the world who have made a contribution to humanity.
The focus of the show, though, is on Chris and his writings, which are saved on his personal computer and eventually retrieved by his parents. This gives the show an intimately autobiographical feel, and the precise dates and times of his actions and activities have a diary quality. It’s a story worth telling, even if it makes you cry.
Chris’s commentary, dodging shells and craters, also adds a thriller-like immediacy and tension to the story. Smoking a rolled cigarette and pushing his four-wheel-drive Toyota through mud and crackling gunfire, Chris looks like the most fulfilled, happiest man in the world. And a young man in love. The hardest messages for Chris to process are those saved on the phone of his partner, Olya Khomenko (he calls her “cheekbones”), whom he met in Kiev. They planned to settle in Ukraine, holiday in Cornwall and have children, but we see that the closer they get, the more he wants to get closer to the front, and the more she wants him to stop. When she first meets him, she finds him, in a charming way, “a lunatic”; but when they separate after the only Christmas they’ve spent together, she takes a photo of the happily smitten lad at the train station because she thinks it might be the last. A week later, he and his colleagues break into the Wagner Group and it turns out they’re right. They’re summarily executed – a clear war crime.
But this isn’t a single account of pure bravery. Chris never told his parents he was leaving, or where he was, or the risks he’d taken. He begged his sister not to tell them the truth — it was a terrible dilemma for her. Some of the humanitarian volunteers say they make a lot of money from their Instagram accounts, and their policy is to maximize audience-friendly content — rescued kittens and puppies, not bewildered Ukrainian retirees, are the primary clickbait. Some have used the proceeds to buy new evacuation vehicles, but there’s no clear audit of where the funds went. Some of Chris’s former comrades sound, frankly, like a bit of thrill-seeking show-off. Nonetheless, they saved lives and stopped people from being maimed, raped and kidnapped by Putin’s forces. Chris, we see, is certainly driven by a combination of motivations — a deep sense of injustice, and the adrenaline rush that comes with his reckless mission of mercy.
Like the Polish pilots who fought in the Battle of Britain in 1940 and the foreigners who joined the International Brigades to fight the fascists in the Spanish Civil War, there are always heroes like Chris Parry who, for whatever reason, do the right thing. This unbearably sad film is partly his memorial; the rest lives on in the hearts of the strangers he escorted to safety.
Helljumper is now available on BBC iPlayer
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