The case studies that form the basis of this chapter are documentary films, and while they share with the theatrical productions featured in chapters one and two a concern with the challenging question of how belonging and inhabiting are to be reconfigured in the face of the person who seeks asylum, they raise different sets of questions with respect to the ethics and aesthetics of representation as well as to how they engaged affective audience/viewer responses to the portrayal of relationships between citizens and noncitizens. Over the following pages, I situate two Australian feature length documentary films, Letters to Ali (2004), written and directed by Clara Law and co-written by Eddie L. C. Fong, and Hope (2007), directed by Steve Thomas, in terms of how they portray complex textures of emotional contact between filmmakers and their subjects, and between citizen and noncitizen subjects. Law's extensive body of film work dates from the early 1980s and has mostly been occupied with transnational cultural identity and Asian diasporas; Letters to Ali was her first documentary. Thomas, on the other hand, has made several issues-based social interest documentaries since the early 1990s. In both films, interpersonal relationships, newly forged in the conflux of trauma and sympathetic response, take on ambiguously familial qualities, raising questions about ancestry, relatedness and territoriality.

On a very basic level, the reflective capabilities of film and digital technologies facilitate the forensic intimacy of the close up or zoom and can also take in visual expanses, scoping potentially vast geographies; documentary film, in particular, can enable subjects, including asylum seekers and refugees, to appear, and to speak as and for themselves without risking the public, aestheticized repetition inherent to theatrical appearance. Documentary film has obvious elements in common with the types of verbatim work and theatres of reality discussed in chapter one, but whereas such theatre's technical scope and counter-hegemonic ideological purpose tend to attenuate or even prevent the appearance of certain individuals—children, non-actors, stakeholders from metropolitan and rural backgrounds, including those whose views and rationales oppose those of the director or writer—documentary film can encompass some or all such individuals.