“We live with maybes”: Searching for missing relatives in post-war Azerbaijan

Anthropologist Leyla joins Reyhan, whose husband Salim went missing during the First Nagorno-Karabakh war (1988-1994) between Azerbaijan and Armenia, and Sadagat, a sister of missing Gurban, in their visits to family members of other missing persons in different districts of Azerbaijan. Together, they document the various ways in which the families of missing persons have been dealing with their losses in the absence of certainty. When conclusive knowledge is unattainable and even forensic technologies can’t promise the final answer, people resort to other ways of knowing to acquire their truths. How do people learn to “move on” and coexist with their uncertainties under the condition of impossibility of full knowledge? How do dreams, fortune-telling, visceral sensations, and rumors come to factor in the process of constructing one’s truths? The film grapples with these questions.