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This year's Academy Award winner for Best Documentary Short Subject was Orlando von Einsiedel's The White Helmets (2016,41 min.), a film that bears witness to a volunteer group's efforts to rescue civilians after air bombings in Syria. Of the other four films nominated in this category, two-Daphne Matziaraki's 4.1 Miles (2016, 26 min.) and Marcel Mettelsiefen's Watani: My Homeland (2016, 40 min.)-document the lived experiences of Syrian migrants. These nominations signal the increasing visibility of an emergent genre of documentary shorts that focus on the Syrian crisis and survivor stories. These documentary shorts, which we consider instances of activist media,1 are produced by independent filmmakers, non-mainstream media outlets such as Aljazeera (based in Qatar), and nonprofit organizations in the West. Given their major exhibition sites in North America and Europe, these documentary shorts are targeted at primarily Western audiences. In addition, mainstream media organizations such the Guardian (UK), CBC (Canada), TIME magazine (US), BBC (UK), and ABC News (US) have produced several documentary shorts that examine the Syrian crisis from the perspectives of affected Syrian civilians and migrants. While these mainstream media productions may not be associated with activist media practices, we would argue that they occupy an inbetween space between mainstream and activist media and, together with independent documentary shorts, demonstrate the important space that this genre has occupied in the Western cultural imaginary.
In this essay, we examine contemporary documentary shorts on the Syrian crisis and their role as tools of critical media literacy in a post-factual age. We argue that these documentaries function as cine-testimonials2 bearing witness to the Syrian crisis, often from the vantage point of the affected Syrians, and thus as activist media challenging the contested political rhetoric and hegemonic narratives about Syrian refugees in the global North. These dominant discourses, such as the stereotype of Syrians as terrorists and as threats to national security in European and North American nations, are frequendy disseminated and interpreted as facts that inform public opinion and policy decisions.3 In turn, activist and proto-activist documentary shorts have sought to revise these dominant narratives by employing documentary images and testimonies to construct a counter-argument and a counter-archive of facts that highlight the lived realities of Syrians in their home nation, in refugee camps, and in...