Screening of (Dis)Appear (UK, 2023) and Q&A with director.

Screening of a documentary about the relationship between photography, memory and the political violence and forced disappearances perpetrated by Argentina’s last military dictatorship

(Dis)Appear follows Gabriel and Ana as they return to their hometown and explore what role domestic photography can play when faced with personal and collective traumas related to the forced disappearances and systematic murderer perpetrated by Argentina’s most recent civic-miliary dictatorship (1976-1983).

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; 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.

(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.

This screening and Q&A is organised as part of a British Academy funded project entitled: Image and (Dis)Appearance: photographic encounters in post-dictatorship Argentina.

Piotr Cieplak is Professor of Creative Practice and Visual Cultures in the Faculty of Media, Arts and Humanities at the University of Sussex. Piotr's research is concerned with the intersection of visual media cultures with memorial, political, commemorative and justice processes related to large scale violence.

Piotr has written extensively about image-based representation of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, including one of the first monographs on the topic: Death|Image|Memory: The Genocide in Rwanda and Its Aftermath in Photography and Documentary Film (Palgrave, 2017). His more recent work is related to photographic legacies of the Argentine civic-military dictatorship and includes the first edited collection on the topic in English: Familiar Faces: Photography, Memory and Argentina's Disappeared (Goldsmiths/MIT Press, 2024).

Piotr's films have won awards and screened widely at international film festivals, conferences and on TV. He's the writer, director and producer of two feature documentaries about the relationship between photography and memory: The Faces We Lost (2017) – in the context of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda – and (Dis)Appear (2023) – in the context of Argentina’s civic-military dictatorship (1976–1983). The films received plaudits from AHRC Film Awards, The British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies and Learning on Screen. The Faces We Lost screened on American Public Television as part of the Afropop series.

Piotr is currently a British Academy Mid-Career Fellow (2024-2025).

This is a free public event. There is no need to register, but please contact mediaresearchsupport@leeds.ac.uk if you wish to attend.