Atlas of Disappearance

Over a period of more than twenty years, the Franco regime quietly orchestrated the exhumation and transport of more than 33.000 bodies from mass graves throughout Spain to El Valle de los Caídos, the monumental mausoleum built to glorify the fascist victory. Despite recent legislative progress, exhumation projects remain stalled, leaving families—some now in their third or fourth generation—without answers, without graves, and without closure. Facing legal and bureaucratic obstacles, the film uses new forensic technologies, like digital mapping and forensic reconstruction, to reconstruct what oblivion and oppression sought to conceal.

The Documentary Research Office (OID), founded by director Manuel Correa, is a trans-disciplinary research unit composed of geographers, filmmakers, architects, and artists. They want to restore visibility to what was meant to be hidden: mass-graves, forced transfers, detention centers, and other erased geographies of violence. This film brings that work to the screen, bridging data and memory, space and story, so that those affected by disappearance may find a place to mourn, remember, and demand justice. We follow three relatives of the disappeared as they undertake a long and complex journey to recover the remains of their loved ones. The families have preserved archives about the disappearances. Documents, letters, and memories that bear witness to both personal loss and the systematic destruction of evidence, but which at the same time insist on the dignity that the victims were deprived of.