Short Film Festival - 2026 Disappearance Studies Conference

Producers: After War & Squawk · France, 2025 · 52 minutes ·  Documentary

Synopsis: The missing soldiers and civilians abducted or lost in the fighting represent the blind spot of the war in Ukraine. The documentary follows three women searching for their husbands, oscillating between hope and an impossible grief.

Like tens of thousands of others, they relentlessly investigate, scouring government offices and social media, and awaiting every prisoner exchange. The film adopts a female perspective on the war, focusing not on the offensives but on the traces left by this haunting absence.

Colombia, 2026 · 20 min 30 sec · Documentary · Spanish with English subtitles

Synopsis: Desde Adentro follows four “buscadoras” in Medellín, Colombia, who have spent years — some of them decades — searching for loved ones disappeared in the context of the armed conflict.

Members of the collective Desde Adentro, they bring their experiences of searching and institutional revictimization to the stage, using theatre as a practice of hacer memoria, denunciation, and resistance.

Moving between testimony, performance, and landscape, the film traces how the buscadoras carry their loved ones’ names into public and territorial memory — and asks, again and again, the question that remains unanswered: Where are they?

The screening of the documentaries will be followed by a short Q&A session in the presence of Anne Poiret, director of “Ghosts of Ukraine”, and Sophie Raehme, director of “Desde Adentro: Where the Elements Carry Their Names”.