Watching to witness : responses beyond empathy to refugee documentaries

The present chapter follows a similar call to ethical responsiveness of visual material, albeit in this case to recent refugee-themed documentaries in Australia that explicitly set out to advocate for better treatment of asylum seekers. Again, the focus is not on the representation of refugee subjects per se, but rather on what constitutes an ethical encounter with these mediated stories. From a small sample of audience responses obtained in a pilot study screening of the Australian documentary Freedom Stories (2015, dir. Steve Thomas), I will attempt to arrive at a manner of ‘witnessing’ that is an ethical intervention in refugee advocacy by virtue of being neither too distant nor too close