Marcela Zamora
2015 | 52 minutes | El Salvador, Mexico
Across Mexico and Central America, the last twenty years have been plagued by a meteoric and troubling rise in desaparecidosor missing persons. Mass murder has become all too common, and the identity of the perpetrators remains unknown as the relationship between governments, gangs, and other criminal organizations is shrouded in mystery. As civil and legal systems have failed to thoroughly investigate the crisis, families of victims are left to seek closure and justice on their own. In The Room of Bones, El Salvadoran filmmaker Marcela Zamora follows a group of forensic anthropologists in her home country tasked with the noble but gruesome work of unearthing human remains and matching them with names of desaparecidos. The result is a harrowing portrait of a region in crisis.
Preceded by What Remains
Lee Douglas and Jorge Moreno Andrés
2014 | 30 minutes| Spain, U.S.A.
Director in Attendance
Though official records don’t exist, experts in Spain believe that at least 118,000 people were “disappeared” during Generalissimo Francisco Franco’s totalitarian regime. Since 2000, an estimated 2,000 bodies from the era have been exhumed from hundreds of mass graves—a gruesome and brutal legacy literally buried in the nation’s soil. What Remainsfollows two anthropologists as they aid one family’s attempt to overcome decades of silence and piece together their own history.
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