20 Days in Mariupol is a war documentary that shows the horror of Russian attacks on civilians in Mariupol from the perspective of a Ukrainian journalist.
As expected, the media has received this documentary well, and it has been almost universally criticized for portraying the war in a one-sided manner and narrating the social context of the war without showing collective responsibility or historical guilt.

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The war documentary genre usually focuses on the momentary and human narrative of the disaster, and for this reason, the makers of such documentaries do not accept the lack of historical analysis of the causes of the war. In defense of this documentary, it is said that the documentary is actually trying to document crimes against civilians and does not seek the political or historical roots of the conflict.The omission of historical context is a methodological flaw from the perspective of analysts who seek a multi-faceted narrative, but the filmmakers argue that in a situation of siege and slaughter, there is no room for two-sidedness.
Collective responsibility or historical guilt are among the issues that war documentaries avoid addressing unless they are made in the form of a historical analysis. In this documentary, the only clear issue is the violation of international law by Russian forces.
Any documentary can unintentionally hide part of the truth, but in a war situation where international evidence, including the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross, confirms Russia’s systematic violations of human rights, focusing on one-sidedness is not something that today’s media likes, and they naturally believe that this will lead to ignoring evidence of crimes.
But such a documentary is completely political and cannot be described as impartial.The narrative style is entirely in the service of provoking the audience's emotions. As a result, we cannot accept the producers' claims of impartiality and an attempt at a completely documentary narrative.
Every documentary made in the midst of a conflict, regardless of which side it is on, inevitably has a certain position, but the difference between a propaganda work and a news documentary is that the propaganda work seeks to hide the crimes of its own parties. The documentary 20 Days in Mariupol shows the crimes of Russian forces but makes no claim to be analyzing the cause of the war or historical responsibility. It defines its task as simply documenting human tragedies over a specific period of time.
Even if a film does not want to provoke the audience's emotions, seeing the deaths of civilians naturally provokes emotions.The filmmakers do not necessarily claim to be completely neutral, saying, “We are journalists, we are under siege, we cannot protect the people of Mariupol, and we can only film for the whole world to see.”
This is the standard method of journalism in war zones, namely to record events without analyzing the cause.
But many Western audiences perceive this documentary as the entire history of the war, replacing it with an understanding of the 2014 tensions, the NATO issue, Ukrainian nationalism, the Odessa massacre, or the Minsk agreements. Perhaps this is more indicative of the problem of incomplete perception of the audience.
Such a documentary could have been made from very different perspectives or completely different situations, but even the support of the mass media for such a documentary is politically biased. Neutrality is meaningful when you can put conflicting thoughts and feelings together with appropriate weight.This documentary can claim to be impartial when it interviews people who agree with this war. It finds people who are ordinary people but agree with the war. It interviews people who are critical of their own culture and consider the people of their society worthy of such an experience. There are also people in every society but the biased media ignores them.
In media theory, there are two definitions of impartiality. In a minimal definition, or raw journalism, it is described as showing the facts on the ground without manipulation.
In a maximal definition, or inclusive journalism, all meaningful voices in a conflict should be represented with appropriate weight, which this documentary does not have.

The filmmaker could have interviewed Russian-speaking citizens of Donbas or families of separatist soldiers elsewhere in Ukraine, but he did not.That is, the film's frame is intentionally limited to one city and one time period, and this is considered a kind of framing bias.

In every war, including the Ukrainian war, there are citizens who support the war for identity, national or historical reasons, even if they are victims of bombing; they are critical of their own culture and believe that some historical mistakes of Ukraine, such as the suppression of the rights of Russian speakers after 2014, paved the way for this disaster.

These voices are not present in the Mariupol documentary, and the uninformed audience sees the war as merely a one-sided and evil invasion, and the informed audience realizes that the film merely shows one piece of the puzzle.

The mass media support such a documentary because of its structural bias.If a documentary were made tomorrow showing Russian civilians dying in Belgorod under Ukrainian attacks and interviewing Russian mothers who said: We deserve these attacks because we supported Putin's policies; would the same media be willing to broadcast it? Probably not. Or if it were broadcast, it would be covered up with the title of Russian propaganda.

This documentary does not lie, but rather tells an incomplete and biased truth. A truly balanced documentary would include footage of the bombing, interviews with citizens who say they witnessed the killing of Russian speakers by right-wing Ukrainian groups in 2014. It would also include interviews with captured Russian soldiers to tell them what story they were told, and a comparison of the casualty figures on both sides with similar atrocities in history.

But 20 Days in Mariupol has none of these. For this reason, its claim to impartiality is invalid.This is an emotional and propaganda documentary, in the service of a specific political narrative, even if its images are real. The reality of the images alone does not prove the impartiality of the entire work