Audience reactions to the film “Yuryk”: the perception of the fictional and documentary in the contemporary media space

The relevance of this study is determined by the fact that contemporary war films increasingly combine fictional and documentary features, making fiction cinema a specific type of media content that elicits distinctive audience reactions. Yuryk, created to depict the fate of Ukrainian children amid the tragedy of Mariupol, generated public debate, including criticism regarding the accuracy of portrayed events. Accordingly, the study examines audience responses to the film as media content and focuses on perception mechanisms that erase distinctions between fiction and documentary, as well as on the application of journalistic accuracy standards to a fictional film. The aim of the article is to identify the psychological, media-communicative, and cultural factors that led to the ambiguous audience reaction to the film Yuryk, as well as to analyze the boundaries between fictional and documentary truth in the perception of contemporary audiovisual content related to military themes. The methodological basis is a content analysis of reviews and viewer comments on social networks and online platforms, enabling the systematisation of positive, negative, and neutral reactions and the identification of criteria by which viewers assess the “reality” of depicted events and the artistic value of the film. The study concluded that personal wartime experience, emotional involvement, and autobiographical proximity significantly influence viewers’ perception of the film not as a creative fiction but as a documentary account. Many responses from Mariupol residents and combatants point to discrepancies between the film and real events, emphasizing the need to consider journalistic standards even in fiction cinema. The novelty of the study lies in a comprehensive analysis of the reception of a Ukrainian war-related fiction film through content-analysis methods, identifying patterns in the merging of fictional and documentary modes, and highlighting the erosion of boundaries between different types of media content.