(Dis)Appear
(Dis)Appear follows Gabriel and Ana as they return to their hometown and explore what role photography can play when faced with personal and collective traumas of the past. It is a documentary about the powerful relationship between photos, memory and the forced disappearances and systematic murderer perpetrated by Argentina’s most recent dictatorship (1976-1983).
(Dis)Appear is a film about the personal becoming political and about the important part private, family photography can play in the ongoing memory work related to survival, grief and the search for justice.
Gabriel Orge is a photographer known for his large-scale projections of the photos of the disappeared in public spaces. Ana Iliovich is an author and survivor of La Perla, a clandestine torture and detention centre; in many ways, a concentration camp. They were both born and raised in Bell Ville, and that’s where they return to in (Dis)Appear. Gabriel comes back to organize a commemorative projection of the photo of a local woman murdered by the dictatorship. Ana, and her brother Lisandro, return to start a long-overdue conversation about a family photograph taken in 1977, when Ana was allowed to leave the concentration camp and visit her family for the first time since her kidnapping. During this period of monitored “freedom” – in which she had to return to La Perla after weekends at home – Ana’s family took many photographs, to prove that Ana was alive and to try to stop her from being killed.
With 40 years since the return of democracy to Argentina, and with new threats it is currently facing, (Dis)Appear shows us that the past is never just the past.
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Piotr CieplakDirectorClosed Casket, Do You Remember That Year?, The Faces We Lost, Memory Cards
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Piotr CieplakWriterClosed Casket, Do You Remember That Year?, The Faces We Lost, Memory Cards
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Mariana Tello WeissWriter
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Piotr CieplakProducer
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Ana IliovichKey Cast
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Gabriel OrgeKey Cast
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Lisandro IliovichKey Cast
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Project Type:Documentary
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Runtime:1 hour 4 minutes 9 seconds
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Completion Date:May 1, 2023
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Production Budget:30,000 USD
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Country of Origin:Argentina
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Country of Filming:Argentina
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Language:Spanish
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Shooting Format:Digital
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Aspect Ratio:16:9
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Film Color:Color
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First-time Filmmaker:No
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Student Project:No
Distribution Information
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Illumina FilmsSales AgentCountry: NetherlandsRights: All Rights
Piotr is the writer and director of Memory Cards (UK, 2015), The Faces We Lost (UK, 2017), Closed Casket (UK, 2020), Do You Remember That Year? (UK, 2021) and (Dis)Appear (UK, 2023). His films have screened at international festivals around the world, on TV, and received numerous awards.
Festival Selections:
Africa-in-Motion Film Festival (UK) 2015 and 2017
Rwanda Film Festival 2015 and 2017
66th Montecatini International Short Film Festival (Italy) 2016
Afrykamera: International African Film Festival (Poland) 2016 and 2019
Cambridge African Film Festival (UK) 2017 (Closing film)
World Film Festival (Estonia) 2018
Festival International du Film Panafricain de Cannes (France) 2018
Forest City Film Festival (Canada) 2019
Wicked Queer LGBTQ+ Festival (USA) 2021
Aesthetica Short Film Festival (UK) 2021
QueerBee (UK) 2021
Awards:
Best Lens Award at Afrykamera: International African Film Festival (Poland) 2016
Runner up in Best Moving Image Research Portfolio Prize at British Association of Film, TV and Screen Studies (BAFTSS) 2018
Nominated for the Best Research Film of the Year by Arts and Humanities Research Council 2018
Finalist at Honolulu Rainbow Film Festival (USA) 2021
Honourable mention at HomoHumour (UK) 2021
Winner of Video World Premiere Prize at Avanca Film Festival (Portugal) 2021
Winner of Best SmartPhone Film at South Coast Film Festival (United Kingdom) 2021
The civic-military dictatorship in Argentina (1976-1983) killed and/or disappeared 30,000 people. They were kidnapped, tortured and murdered in a network of clandestine detention centres. Drugged but still alive, many were dropped into the sea during “death flights” or buried in unmarked graves. Private archive and family album photographs repurposed for public protest and commemoration have played a key role in the memorialisation of the victims, and the ongoing struggle for recognition and justice. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, protesting with ID photographs of their disappeared children, themselves became the iconic image associated with that time. Four decades later, these photographs continue to traverse the complex space between private and public mourning, activism and politics.
I had wanted to make a film about the photos of the disappeared in Argentina for a long time, probably since I first visited the country in 2004. But I also wanted the film to be more than a mere illustration. I wanted it to make the viewers ask: what does it mean to disappear and to appear, in life but also in a photograph? Crucially, I also wanted to ask the difficult question about what it means to survive.
Many of the photos of the disappeared in Argentina did not begin their existence with the purpose of documenting history. They were usually family album or I.D. photographs that people turned to in a desperate attempt to prove the existence and disappearance of their loved ones. But then, they became so much more.
Gabriel’s large-scale and breath-taking projections (which have taken places all over South America, including the Atacama Desert) insert the disappeared into the public space. In a way, they reclaim the disappeared person’s place in the world for everyone to see and to remember. Ana’s photo and story, on the other hand, are extremely intimate and private. And yet, they tell us so much not only about Ana’s experience but also about the wider impact of forced disappearance on Argentine society, and especially the social unit of the family. Ana’s photo is proof that a simple family portrait can conceal as much as it can show; and that it can mean different things for different viewers.
It is my hope that through exploring these two extremes of the kind of role photography can play in our lives, (Dis)Appear introduces the audience to the complex phenomenon of public display of personal photographs in the context of political violence – a practice pioneered in Argentina, but one which has since spread globally. But also that it makes us think about how important photographs are in their capacity to be, in Marianne Hirsch’s words, ‘harbingers of death’ while, at the same time, having the unique ability ‘to signify life.’