Experiencing the brand-new “Alternate Realities” programme at this year’s Sheffield Doc/Fest—the UK’s largest documentary film festival—was dizzying and diverse. Following on from Sundance and Cannes, which have recently made their first serious forays into virtual reality, Doc/Fest curators put 12 major VR and other interactive projects into their programme this year.

Twenty-three years since Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, he hasn’t stopped collecting testimonies of firsthand accounts from Holocaust survivors.

Today, these stories and more, totaling 53,000 tales of horror and survival, have been documented and archived at the USC Shoah Foundation — The Institute for Visual History and Education, which Spielberg founded, housed at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. 

In the 1990s, the USC Shoah Foundation conducted video interviews with thousands of Holocaust survivors, so that their stories are never forgotten. The nonprofit's digital library currently houses 53,000 video testimonies, and in recent years has expanded to capture testimony from those who witnessed the 1994 Rwandan Tutsi Genocide, the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, and the Armenian Genocide that coincided with World War I.

The USC Shoah Foundation announced Wednesday it is broadening access to its archive of genocide testimony by partnering with a technology company that connects researchers at universities, libraries, schools and organizations around the world. Starting immediately, ProQuest will become the exclusive distributor of the USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education’s Visual History Archive to colleges and universities around the world, except in China, according to foundation Executive Director Stephen Smith.

Nearly 80 years later, Liu Suzhen could still recall her ordeal. And when she did, her ruddy cheeks burned. She shielded her face with chapped, swollen fingers as though Japanese bombers were zooming down as she spoke. "My neighborhood was among the last to fall. When the sirens sounded, my aunt and I'd run and duck inside the bunker," said Liu, now 84, leaning on her dragon-head walking stick. "This is the history that my granddaughter has been passing on to her son."

ABINAL, Guatemala (AP) — Juan Chen Chen lit up as he recalled a childhood spent romping in the Guatemalan countryside, playing soccer and spinning tops while his parents harvested maize and squash. But his voice turned somber and his eyes wandered blankly to focus on a nonexistent horizon as he described the events of March 1980, when the army came to town. Chen managed to hide, but others weren’t so lucky.