Coming to WORLD Channel’s Global Voices series this Sunday, June 30: NIÑOS DE LA MEMORIA
María Teresa Rodríguez’s search for El Salvador’s disappeared children made its debut at Ambulante last year. It has screened at numerous universities, as well as at festivals like DOXA, San Diego Latino, Cine+Mas SF, Punta del Este, and Uruguay’s International Festival of Cinema and Human Rights. After its broadcast, the doc will be available for a limited time on WORLD’s website.
The twelve-year Salvadoran Civil War between the military government and leftist guerrillas saw systematic slaughtering of civilians, as well as the seizure of surviving children by soldiers. While some were taken in by military families, others lost their identities in orphanages or through irregular international adoptions during the chaotic time. These disappeared and unaccounted for children of the 1980s, now three decades removed from their biological families, are the focus of Rodríguez’s often moving film, which follows three individuals affected by the conflict: Margarita, a human rights investigator who uses survivor testimony and DNA sampling to try to locate and identify the missing, including her own siblings; Salvador, an older farmer whose family was brutally murdered, save for one lost daughter; and Jamie, who was adopted by an unsuspecting Jewish American family, but hopes to find some connection to lost relatives during her first return trip to El Salvador. There are sadly no miraculous reunions on display here, underscoring the ongoing challenges these subjects, and thousands more, face in reconciling the damage done to their society. A change of political leadership, however, offers some hope that, even thirty years later, progress – and justice – may still be possible.
what (not) to doc 