The day after we filmed Joseph Pierre-Louis in the Bois Neuf neighbourhood of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, he told us that he ‘feels taller. I don't know if I have grown taller, but I feel taller.’ We had visited the area in 2018, 10 years after a UN peacekeeping mission raid had left scores of civilians dead and many houses demolished. Edren Elisma, whose 10-year-old daughter Vanne was shot in bed during the same raid, said ‘It's the first time since it happened that someone has come to talk to us about it.’ He showed the project team the bullet holes in the roof of his house in which he and his daughter were shot. He continued, ‘I think that thanks to the strangers’ mission and what they do I have the opportunity to be heard.’ As Elif Shafak writes, ‘Stories bring us together. Untold stories keep us apart.’ I have spent most of my film-making life working with communities and individuals who rarely get the opportunity to have their stories recorded and witnessed on a public platform. This has been more than an individual journey, one shared not only with the participants in the documentary films but also with the project teams who have collaborated in the films’ productions. This book is an attempt to critically reflect on the processes and outcomes involved in such a journey.

This is also an update on the publication, Recording Memories from Political Violence: A Filmmaker's Journey (2010), which provided insights into the film-making projects that I had been involved with up to that point, and which had come out of a PhD thesis of the same name. Two of the projects in this book build on previous foundations, for example, the Prisons Memory Archive (PMA), a collection of 160 filmed walk-and-talk recordings inside the prisons of the North of Ireland that operated during the conflict known as the Troubles, has since benefited from a £500,000 grant from the National Heritage Lottery Fund in order to preserve the archive and make it accessible. We Never Gave Up is the third film in a trilogy produced in collaboration with the Human Rights Media Centre, Cape Town, and engages with the legacy of apartheid in South Africa. Two more recent major film projects are also addressed.