This volume examines documentary films that compel us to bear witness, move us to anger or tears, and possibly mobilize us to action. The essays gathered here analyze questions regarding the usefulness and legitimacy of documentary testimony: What is the value of the historical archive the televised public hearings or activist online videos constitute? Is it made part of the official record, or dismissed as renegade or ephemeral? To what extent can documentary bring about social change? How do the documentary testimonies compensate for or account for the frailty of memory?

Bhaskar Sarkar is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is author of Mourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition.

Janet Walker is Professor and former chair of the Department of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her many authored and edited books include Couching Resistance: Women, Film, and Psychoanalytic Psychiatry, Feminism and Documentary, Westerns: Films through History, and Trauma Cinema: Documenting Incest and the Holocaust.

Introduction: Moving Testimonies Bhaskar Sarkar and Janet Walker

1. Embodied Memory: The Institutional Mediation of Survivor Testimony in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Noah Shenker

2. "We Shall Drown, But We Shall Not Move": The Ecologics of Testimony in NBA Documentaries Bishnupriya Ghosh

3. Rights and Return: Perils and Fantasies of Situated Testimony after Katrina Janet Walker

4. From "Superbabies" and "Nazi Bastards" to Victims Finding a Voice: The Memory Trajectory of the Norwegian Lebensborn Children Bjørn Sørenssen

5. Reclamation of Voice: The Joint Authorship of Testimony in The Murmuring Trilogy Hye Jean Chung

6. Trauma, Memory, Documentary: Re-enactment in Two Films by Rithy Panh (Cambodia) and Garin Nugroho (Indonesia) Deirdre Boyle

7. On Documentary and Testimony: The Revisionists' History, the Politics of Truth, and the Remembrance of the Massacre at Acteal, Chiapas José Rabasa

8. Mediating Testimony: Broadcasting South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission Catherine Cole

9. Mediating Genocide: Producing Digital Survivor Testimony in Rwanda Mick Broderick

10. Between Orbit and the Ground: Conflict Monitoring, Google Earth and the "Crisis in Darfur" Project Lisa Parks