It is no great revelation that full-scale wars stimulate incredible growth of documentary filmmaking, as can be seen with the response to the war in Ukraine. By adopting developed technology, Ukrainian filmmakers achieve new levels of realism and reflection. Russia's war against Ukraine, which escalated from an omit conflict in the Donbas region and the annexation of Crimea in 2014 to a full-scale invasion in 2022, attacking Ukraine's legitimacy and independence, shapes the history of contemporary Ukrainian documentary history. Documentarians capture this war using modern audiovisual technology, reflecting the nation’s trauma, which serves as a weapon in the information battle. By analysing the films 20 dniv u Mariupoli /20 Days in Mariupol (Mstyslav Chernov, 2023, USA) and Myrni lyudy/Intercepted (Oksana Karpovych, 2024, Canada, France, Ukraine), this essay argues that digital cameras and sound recording not only reflect social and political realities but also play a crucial role in documenting a compelling narrative that mobilises support, attention and deconstructs the propaganda narratives of the aggressor. This essay will examine the technological and aesthetic aspects of these films in their shared goal of distributing facts, and will critically analyse the risks those aspects bring with them.
The crucial tool that expanded the possibilities of documentary cinema is the digital camera. As film theorist Bill Nichols (2016: 73) asserted, the invention of lightweight 16mm cameras and synchronous sound recording allowed filmmakers to be mobile and to observe more inaccessible places, adapting easily to challenging settings. The impact of technological advancements in documentary cameras can be examined within the paradigm of documentary modes and the historical reasons accompanying them (ibid.: 62). The development of cameras alongside the evolution of military technology is particularly relevant. War, as something hyperrealistic in the horror it evokes, demanded new adaptive technologies for its representation. By the late 1980s, with the advent of the first digital cameras, documentation of reality became more accessible due to the further physical compactness of the cameras, their improved resilience to extreme environments, and the simplification of distribution and editing of footage (Nichols 2016: 90). However, along with this new capability of cameras, comes the inevitable ethical question of representing graphic evidence. Detailed, high-quality graphic documentation from war has emotional value and consequently can have substantial political influence. Recognising the ethical risks and unstable boundaries of such representations, Nichols (2016: 156) poses a rhetorical question: “What limits should be voluntarily adopted to safeguard the dignity and rights of the subject as a human and as more than a victim?” Lilie Chouliaraki, in The Spectatorship of Suffering (2006) explores mediation and its potential for emotional involvement in the suffering observed by the spectator and the paradigm of semiotic codes through which documentary footage engages the viewer in this mediation. Chouliaraki also emphasises that mediation between the spectator and the sufferer is a critical political space that projects geopolitical influence (2006: 22). It is crucial to analyse which techniques directors use and which iconic and indexical signs they employ. Whether in compliance with or in violation of ethical standards, they aim to bring the spectator closer to the victim and mobilise their engagement. Chouliaraki (2006: 19) questions how exactly the medium engages in empathy and what distances it establishes.
The film that best encompasses the aforementioned technological and aesthetic aspects is 20 Days in Mariupol (2023), directed by Mstyslav Chernov, a professional Ukrainian reporter for The Associated Press. Since 2014, Mstyslav has joined the Associated Press, covering major conflicts and social issues worldwide. Today he is the president of the Ukrainian Association of Professional Photographers, a Pulitzer Prize laureate and the Academy Award-winning director (Chernov 2025). Although he covered the war in Ukraine before the siege of Mariupol, those 20 days changed his career forever. The film captures the full-scale war in Mariupol, a major city in Eastern Ukraine. Mariupol was swiftly surrounded by enemy forces, committing war crimes against humanity, resulting in a minimum of 20,000 deaths (Shevchenko 2023). For 20 days, Chernov (2023) and his two colleagues stayed in the heart of the siege, documenting the city's destruction and constantly searching for places with reception to transmit their footage to the news and break the information blockade. However, the significant contribution to the information battle did not end with journalistic work. After evacuating from Mariupol, it transformed into a cinematic form, as Chernov (2023) realised the footage’s power and wanted to create a film to garner more support.
20 Days in Mariupol (2023) shows the occupation chronologically, which brings together an immense number of deaths, hunger, and fear, and the camera captures this suffering closely. Chernov uses the technological capabilities of the camera and films extreme moments of the war, under direct military action and approaching civilians, capturing human suffering on a personal level. It can be seen from the notoriously famous footage of the bombing of the maternity hospital. The scene starts with chaotic shots, indicating that the director was running to the location with the rolling camera. The next shot covers the hospital yard, filled with rubble and wounded people coming out of the destroyed building. As the camera approaches these people, a new air raid alert sounds, and rescuers ask everyone to take cover. Moving from the daylit street, Chernov goes inside the dark shelter and continues filming people's reactions, rhythmically operating camera angles and rapidly moving. Chernov (2023) stated that he used the “SONY A7SIII for its low light capabilities and the Sony FE 24-240mm F/3.5-6.3 lens for the ability to quickly capture a wide range of shots from wide angles to close-ups”. It can be seen from the scene how the camera adapts to changes in lighting and how it can shoot prolonged shots under extreme circumstances. Furthermore, once Chernov goes back outside, he continues to follow a pregnant woman being carried on a stretcher, with the camera focusing on her wounds against the backdrop of destroyed buildings, using deep focus to capture the entire mise-en-scène. Consequently, those moments became a direct reference to the Mariupol tragedy. Indeed, Chernov's most effective tool for documenting war crimes is the zoom. There is a moment in the film when Chernov notices a tank in the yard while standing on top of the building. He takes the least noticeable position by the window and directs the lens downward, using maximum zoom-in and focus. The camera shows a clear image of the tank with a “Z”, a mark of Russian troops. Such footage is crucial because it not only conveys the truth about the invasion but also serves as an antithesis to the suffering of people, creating a cause-and-effect relationship in the overall picture of the tragedy.
Nonetheless, the camera in 20 Days in Mariupol is primarily aimed at depicting the suffering of the civilians. The film’s increasingly emotional moments set its dominant tone, offering evidence of the war’s nature and through that raising ethical concerns. Chouliaraki (2006: 76) argued that graphic imagery in war reporting is crucial: “It has a stronger aesthetic impact than ‘hearing it happen’ and so makes a stronger impression on spectators’ memories”. 20 Days in Mariupol includes a disarming technique for documentary cinema: the death of children. Yet the director decides not to show their faces, blurring them instead. He realises the camera's technological capabilities to convey reality in detail and consequently chooses to degrade the quality of this reality by obscuring the most shocking details. This approach echoes Castells’ argument, cited in Chouliaraki (2006: 56), that the “normalisation of images of death and war in our everyday experience reduces all television content to its own repertoire of media images”.
By not showing those faces, it can be assumed that the director sets a certain boundary of what is permissible, not only to exclude images of child death from normalisation but also to pay respect to the dead. An additional aspect to consider is how Chernov uses the camera distance once to depict suffering and death, striving not to violate the personal boundaries of the sufferers, yet documenting important moments for global awareness. One of the main locations is the hospital, which became a refuge for the severely wounded and those seeking shelter. Chouliaraki (ibid.: 42) argued that, unlike panoramic bombardment shots, hospital chronicles are much more likely to evoke empathy for the victims. In one scene, Chernov shows the death of a girl who lies on a couch being resuscitated, unsuccessfully, by doctors. The moment of death is shown not with iconic signs, but with indexical ones, as Chouliaraki (2006: 76-77) describes this semiotic representation. Instead of capturing the actual moment of death, the spectator will understand that the child’s death occurred when the camera focuses on the tragic faces of the doctors, who then leave the operating room, and the next shot captures a motionless hand. This shot conveys to the viewer that death has decisively occurred. An additional aspect highlighting the cruciality of technological possibilities and ethical representation is that Chernov continues to use zoom-in actively in the hospital, allowing him to capture sensitive scenes delivering close-ups without violating the physical distance. Zoom forces the viewer to stay with the sufferers, enabling greater empathy.
The gaze [...] is appellative action, and choosing to capture the sufferers’ gaze with the camera is also one of giving them a voice and humanizing them, whereas choosing to film them using long shots may alienate and dehumanize them. (Chouliaraki 2006: 89-90)
Indeed, even in other scenes of suffering, the camera highlights each person and their heavy emotions while emphasising each victim. Thus, the film builds mediation by bringing the viewer closer to the suffering of the patients as individuals, immersing them in emotional and practical reality (Chouliaraki 2006: 42). Chernov’s inventive approach to depicting victims under such challenging conditions is an attempt to avoid the devaluation of their suffering.
Overall, it can be assumed that Chernov's national identity also plays a significant role in decisions. After years in photography, in 2014, Chernov started to work for the Associated Press. Apart from the war in Ukraine, he also covered dozens of wars in the Middle East and multiple European crises. But it was the full-scale invasion, and his immediate survival in it as a Ukrainian citizen, that made Chernov a film director. Nichols (2016: 161) argued that the construction of national identity lay at the foundation of documentary cinema, and Chernov's film confirms this in the digital age. The film has an internal narrative, where the director transforms from a professional reporter to a surviving Ukrainian. This underlies the film’s global structure, executed in the chronology of a personal diary, and includes flashbacks, which are archival home footage of his young daughters. Throughout the film, these shots return to the screen, adding emotional weight to the story. Often, when the camera captures children suffering in the hospital, these archival shots of his daughters follow. As Chouliaraki (2006: 90) asserts:
Another significant choice that regulates the humanization of sufferers is visual juxtaposition. Montages may link the scene of suffering to the zone of safety in various forms of connectivity, such as a cause and effect relationship, which evokes the thought that what happened there may affect us here.
By alternating such binary oppositions, the director urges viewers to think about the universality of childhood and the injustice of children’s suffering. Personal footage personalises the pain, adding context and humanity, making the suffering more significant and relevant to evoke empathy and motivate action. Indeed, juxtaposing such dialectical personal footage, the film becomes not only a tool for raising awareness but also a political argument about the proximity of the threat, which, when realised, should motivate the viewer. Acknowledging Chernov's conscious consideration of ethics and the empathy he brings to his work is imperative. However, 20 Days in Mariupol cannot entirely escape criticism. Representations of death and suffering are inherently fraught with ethical challenges. Despite the use of techniques such as blurring and maintaining appropriate distance, the act of depicting death inevitably extends the ethical boundaries of documentary filmmaking. This compels future filmmakers documenting war to innovate their approaches to engaging viewers, who may become desensitised to such graphic imagery (Chouliaraki 2006: 55).
Undoubtedly, visualising suffering is a way of addressing a strong moral appeal to the viewer, eliciting emotion and prompting action (2006: 42). 20 Days in Mariupol is a vital political weapon against the enemy's propaganda. The political interests of Ukraine and its awareness of the importance of such audiovisual testimonies have propelled film beyond the festival circuit. After winning the “Audience Award” at Sundance (Independent 2023), the film garnered attention and began its journey to numerous significant political platforms. For instance, it was shown at the 78th session of the U.N. General Assembly (AP News 2023), and in March 2024, the film won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. Accepting the Oscar, Mstyslav Chernov stated that he was ready to exchange all his awards for the invasion never to have happened (Oscars 2024). This reflection echoes Nichols's assertion: “The successful careers of many documentary filmmakers have been built on the misfortune of others” (2016: 157). From this reflection, it can be concluded that it is crucial to remember that 20 Days in Mariupol, though bringing awareness in critical political moments, must always be evaluated through the ethical prism of those who suffer, and in light of how digital imagery shapes and challenges the boundaries of what is considered acceptable graphic content.
Another technological aspect of documentary cinema that highlights the full-scale invasion of Ukraine is sound, which plays an equally important role as image in documentary filmmaking and the representation of reality. Nichols (2016: 75-76) contextualises how the hierarchy of voice in documentary cinema has evolved, emphasising that voice emerged in silent films through subtitles or live commentators. With the advent of sound, the voice became entrenched as the "voice of God", an acousmatic, invisible narrator wielding symbolic power through knowledge and testimony (ibid.: 76). However, with the development of documentary cinema and sound recording technologies, time and space was expressed more through the structuring of voice within the film, creating a new type of space: "Continuity of time and space matter less than continuity of thought or emotional tone" (ibid.). This pertains to more experimental, asynchronous forms of sound work in documentary films. In the 1960s, with technological advancements in cameras, the development of sound with synchronous recording fundamentally changed its existence in documentary films, aimed at creating a sense of personal, direct encounter (ibid.: 78). However, in the 1980s, there was a return to more experimental forms of sound, reflecting practices from the 1930s, allowing more space for artistic experiments (ibid.: 79). Another important aspect that contributes to more creative forms of documentary is ambient sound recording on location. It shapes the film’s form, emphasising its message and immersing the viewer in the diegetic space of the story. “Like documentary images, sound recorded on location is similarly responsive and can operate very differently to the heightened and clear points of audition that characterise the highly post-produced sound worlds of fiction film.” (Rogers 2015: 8). Traditionally, the sound environment in documentary films is viewed merely as a background, which is unjustified: "the normative use of ambient sound in film naturalises (and is thereby in service of) the image by providing a fully-rounded audiovisual sense of place." (Strachan and Leonard 2014: 166). The creation of audio space resonates with studies of sound theorist Michel Chion. Although Chion dedicated his research to fiction films, he advocates for the hierarchy of sound in audiovisual art, where sounds and voices have great potential to influence the viewer's emotional response and engagement (Chion 1994: 34). Chion is also known for his theory of acousmêtre, where the viewer does not see the speaker, enriching imagination and attempting to synthesise the speaker and voice (ibid.: 72).
The approaches described above converge in Intercepted (2024), a documentary film by Oksana Karpovych that takes a very different route from 20 Days in Mariupol. Nonetheless, it is a significant example of using pre-recorded voice and ambient sound recordings on location, aiming to raise awareness about the war in Ukraine. Karpovych is a Ukrainian director who, at the beginning of the full-scale invasion, worked as a producer for international media. Observing the realities of war, Karpovych started to listen simultaneously to those viral intercepted calls. In her interview, she mentions the feeling of cognitive dissonance during the process, and thus how the idea of the film was born (Karpovych 2025). Visually, the film is built on observational footage of contemporary Ukraine. It consists of long shots, statically capturing quiet nature, destroyed residential buildings, or people’s everyday lives. While the visuals may not carry productive information, the entire role of conveying context is led by the rich audial part of the film. The audio consists of intercepted phone calls of Russian soldiers participating in the war, speaking with their friends and relatives. This is a cruel symphony of disembodied Russian voices, which discuss their war crimes, personal experiences, homesickness, and most importantly, their doubts about the government and the motivation for this war. Karpovych, like Chernov, works with pre-existing material, transforming it into cinematic form. The phone calls Karpovych used were viral at the beginning of the full-scale invasion, as the Ukrainian government actively published them on social media like YouTube.1 These calls provided detailed insights into the enemy’s psychology, and their commanders' tasks, and even in some cases identified those responsible for specific war crimes. Karpovych revisits them, framing film in an experimental form, to enhance the impact of these candid conversations, and bringing them to international platforms such as festivals.
The crucial aspect of analysing the audial role of the film is to see how these calls are edited and how Karpovych implements them with ambient recordings, building the whole film around it. A significant part of the film remains silent, empathetically giving the viewer a break between such detailed audio testimonies of cruelty. While ambient sound consists of wind, rain, distant indistinct voices, or industrial noises, fill the screen. These everyday sounds are interrupted by beeps, which the director inserts before each intercepted phone conversation begins. Apparently, the audiotrack of soldiers’ voices is edited, as their speech through the phone sounds clear. Remarkably, these two different audio recordings of ambient and voice do not create the listening transitional dissonance that was present in documentary films of the 1950s and 1960s, with the clear distinction between location-recorded sounds full of background noise and neatly studio-recorded sound laid over in post-production, in Intercepted both technical sound qualities are on the same level. The dialectic of the film is created only through the semantic load, which has nothing to do with the actual recording technology. It leads to the conclusion that these two types of sound work are successfully competing with each other in contemporary documentary film (Strachan and Leonard 2014: 173).
The dialectics on which the film is built lie not in the juxtaposition of audio and visual sequences, but in sound narratives within the film. As per the well-known “Statement on Sound” by Eisenstein and Aleksandrov (1928), Karpovych bases her film on counterpoint, not just of the audiovisual, but the counterpoint of two audio tracks – intercepted calls and sound recorded on location. While the visual sequences of destroyed Ukraine become a logical consequence of the Russian invasion, with horrific concrete details from the perpetrators being intercepted in their calls. The most effective juxtaposition in the film is built on the contrast between the ambient sound capturing a troubling silence and the voices of the enemy, who are talking, and those supporting them on the other side of the phone in Russia. Ambient sound does not just design the film’s aesthetics but serves as a trigger prompting reflection on "memory, loss, and identity" (Strachan and Leonard 2014: 168). The ambient sound in the film symbolically represents defenceless and muted, significantly affected by the dominant voice that fills the off-screen. According to Strachan and Leonard, in a sound design similar to Intercepted vocal invasions into the dominant ambient sound, creating "the feeling of temporarily punctuating an extended meditation upon the soundscape" (ibid.: 172). The word "invasion" here is notable, given that the model of imbalance and the abruptness of the calls into the quiet landscape metaphorically relate to the process of a full-scale invasion, shocking in its suddenness and aggressiveness, radically inconsistent with the routine of ordinary people.
Another vital fact is that the director does not show the faces of the synchronously speaking Russian soldiers (although she could have). These voices can be described as haunting, omnipresent predators with actual power in the war and cinematic power in their acousmatic capabilities. Chion (1994: 9) argued that when the viewer does not see the speaker, their imagination works more actively in identifying the faces, and using the term “vococentric”, arguing that the human ear is naturally ‘vococentric’, seeking to recognise the appearance of the speaker. In the case of Intercepted, this is not just the concept of the omniscient narrator, but an integral component of the logical rhetoric constructed through the film’s audiovisual composition. By not showing the enemy, Karpovych raises a reflection on how many Russian soldiers exactly committed crimes. Once the voice is present in the audio part, one's attention to it is involuntary, and more importantly, one tries to understand the voice, correlating it with images on the screen and developing logical conclusions (Chion 1994: 11). Summarising Karpovych’s meticulous work with sound in her film, it can be noted that this experimental approach, reviving audio testimonies from recent archives, not only brings truth to the information battleground but also demands a more thoughtful, nuanced engagement with audiences. Even though Intercepted does not use graphic imagery and avoids ethical matters similar to 20 Days in Mariupol, it might face criticism for that. Namely, its effectiveness in the information field could be questioned: as Chouliaraki (2006: 76) argues, visuals tend to generate a stronger emotional impact — a view that contrasts with Chion’s emphasis on sound as a central narrative force. Due to its experimental nature, Intercepted is unlikely to achieve the same level of success or popularity as 20 Days in Mariupol.
After the film’s premiere at the 74th Berlin Film Festival, Intercepted received the Amnesty International prize, which (according to the website), aims to “Draw the attention of audiences and representatives of the film industry to the theme of human rights and encourage filmmakers to tackle this topic” (Berlinale 2024). It marked the beginning of the increasing attention to the film, and over the year since the premiere, it has been shown at many film festivals around the world, where it was awarded for its artistic quality. Additionally, it received awards highlighting its creative contribution to raising awareness about the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In an interview, the director mentions that she sees this film as a tool for her statement on the collective responsibility of Russians, to refute the “Putin’s war” myth, as Karpovych (2024) formulates it. Thus, the film’s formal approach suggests an idea of the aggressor as a collective, reminding that such voices are still haunting the territories of the sovereign state of Ukraine.
Although 20 Days in Mariupol (2023) and Intercepted (2024) utilise different technological approaches to document the war, they share the common context of the full-scale war in Ukraine and aim to inform global audiences. While 20 Days in Mariupol offers detailed graphic documentation through digital cameras, aiming to represent the suffering respectfully and using juxtaposition, Intercepted presents the truth by capturing the voices of the enemy, using original sound recording and editing technologies in a more experimental approach, underlying dynamics between the aggressors and the victims.. Both documentaries not only share the goal of revealing their authors' perspectives but also serve to garner truth and political support through their respective technological innovations that serve their unique visions.
Sonya Vseliubska
University of The Arts London
1 The intercepted calls from Russian soldiers are available on the official YouTube channel of the Security Service of Ukraine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XXO4TE1sYk
Sonya Vseliubska is a Ukrainian film critic and scholar specialising in contemporary Ukrainian cinema, with a particular focus on documentary film. She is the lead film critic for Ukrainska Pravda, one of Ukraine’s leading socio-political media outlets, and a regular contributor to prominent Ukrainian publications such as Vogue Ukraine and DTF Magazine. Her work has also appeared in IDA Magazine, Modern Times Review, e-flux, IndieWire, and Talking Shorts, among others. Vseliubska holds a BA (Hons) from the University of the Arts London, where she completed a bachelor's thesis on recent Ukrainian archival documentaries that explore themes of memory and war trauma. She is continuing her academic work at the University of Cambridge, pursuing an MPhil focusing on contemporary Ukrainian war documentary.
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