Educational Media Reviews Online

To See You Again is a documentary of the excavation of a mass grave of unidentified corpses in the town of Jojutla in the Morelos province of Mexico. An activist group made up of family members of desaparecidos (people who had disappeared) sued the government to force them to open the grave and exhume the bodies for identification. The film follows these activists over the course of the excavation linearly, skipping days but proceeding in pace with time, and the only editorial context that it provides are a few brief text crawls at the beginning and end. Apart from that, the events, interviews, and shots of the excavation are left to speak for themselves. A good portion of this shows the preparatory work that the activists went through to act in an oversight role, including a crash course in anthropology and archaeology as relates to human remains, what notes to take and why when watching the exhumation and dissection of remains, and how to resist efforts by the state to obscure that oversight.

The film is highly emotional simply by virtue of the power of the events it depicts. Interviews with the victims’ families establish whom they are seeking and the history of their disappearance, but some of the more intense moments come from conversations within the group of activists and one memorable confrontation between the (now former) mayor who had overseen the burial. The editorial voice operates almost entirely through the choice of events to include, and this heightens the impact and the message of the film. The final text crawl narrates the lack of progress since the film, both in terms of the activists identifying their loved ones and the lack of accountability from government officials. Taken as a whole, the documentary operates as a cry of outrage against the intractability of bureaucracy, political corruption, and the continued lack of closure for people suffering from their loss.

For educational purposes, the documentary will be useful as a primary source for scholarship around the issue of disappeared persons in Mexico. There are also potential applications for programs studying law, political science, and anthropology or archaeology. There are some clips that could be separated out for classroom viewing, but it is likely more useful as assigned viewing for homework given the length of the film and the fact that it’s primary source material.

Awards:
Audience Award, Cinema Planeta, Mexico; Best Feature Documentary Feature, Colombia Human Rights Int’l Film Festival, Colombia; José Rovirosa Award for Best Mexican Documentary; Special Mention, Doqumenta International Film Festival, Mexico; Special Mention, DocsMx International Film Festival, Mexico; Best Documentary, Zanate Festival, Mexico, 2020

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