Susan Sontag considers visual representation of victims of atrocities as unethical because it is both ineffective and harmful to the individual’s traumatic experience and the moralities of peace. This claim becomes less obvious when actors involved at both ends of the conflict document their own version of atrocities and victimhood. The new trend of autobiographical war documentaries requires a reassessment of the ethics of visual representation at two levels. First, the ideological positioning of the filmmaker plays a crucial role in historicising the conflict. Second, the filmmaker redefines ‘victimhood’ in relation to the recognition and worthiness of warring parties and civilian populations. Two award-winning autobiographical documentary films directed by filmmakers involved in the Arab-Israeli conflict illustrate the argument. They are Ari Folman’s “Waltz with Bashir” (2008) and Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi’s “Five Broken Cameras” (2011). The argument starts with a discussion of Sontag’s claim in relation to the media of photography and documentary film. While documentary film is more inclusive than photography, it revolves around the ‘creative treatment of actuality’, and is inherently subjective. At the heart of this creative process lies the filmmakers’ ideological positioning within the different autobiographical ‘worlds’ of the two films. Folman’s film is part of a growing revisionist trend, narrating his experience as a former IDF soldier exclusively within the world of military subjects. Conversely, Burnat adopts a more conventional approach as he narrates his own experience of enduring Israeli occupation within the civilians’ world. This ideological positioning of the filmmakers also reconfigures the definition of victimhood of the subjects involved. As the film evolves, Folman’s character is redrawn from the typical image of a perpetrator to an amnesic, tormented victim who is oblivious to the brutality of the military institution he belongs to. On the other hand, Burnat’s character is reconstructed from a passive victim to an active witness subverting the perpetrators’ actions through the camera. The authors’ contrasting ideological positioning and their reversal of victimhood offers multidirectional channels for voicing and excluding the claims of populations involved in atrocities beyond Sontag’s critique.