Las sepultureras

Senem is a forensic anthropologist, and Darija, a researcher. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, a country traumatized by the Balkan wars, one works with the dead, the other with the living. Senem is busy identifying human bones found in decades-old mass graves, while Darija visits families of missing persons to hear their stories and collect their DNA. Both are in charge of making the dead speak to bring justice, reparation and comfort to the living. When Taina Tervonen meets them, she is unaware of the scope of the tasks that fill her days. Throughout ten years and several trips, she takes us into her intimacy, she makes us participants in her dizzying responsibility and the weight of her duties, her commitment and her collapse, as well as her outbursts of joy. She accompanies them in their search for the truth, she tells us about the obstacles that stand in her way, in the midst of a population marked by armed conflict. In the first place, the technical obstacles: complications in collecting the remains from mass graves, most of which have been transferred, as well as difficulties in identifying them. But also human obstacles: silence, lies, trauma.