Video archives often have a stated purpose of displaying ‘understanding’ for the viewer. Understanding, when applied to perpetrators, often means displaying—in the words of one victim at the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission— ‘what kind of man?’ they are to live in the post-conflict society. This question, I suggest in this article, haunts the testimonies of people described as ‘perpetrators’ who speak in video archives. This article examines video archives which document the testimonials of participants in military and political conflicts, with a specific focus on that of the Prisons Memory Archive from Northern Ireland, the Fortunoff Archives of Holocaust survivor testimonies, and their similarities and departures from archives such as Breaking the Silence from Israel/Palestine. Together with more ‘popular’ forms of archiving testimonies of perpetrators and victims, such as Facing the Truth , these archives document many of the incidents and the uncertainties of people involved in the Troubles and those in the Israel Defense Forces. They are not designed as confessionals and yet sometimes they have that quality. The article employs psychoanalytic trauma theories, and their emphasis on the confusions associated with accusation and with confession, to discuss the quality of the confessional in its role as a display of remorse. It then considers both the expectations of confession that arise from any testimonials from participants in conflict, as well as the effect of these expectations in shaping the archive. The article draws on interviews previously undertaken with ‘perpetrators’ subject to the demands of remorse in Northern Ireland, and considers how these demands shape the speech of perpetrators in some video archives.