*Forenses* weaves together three stories about the figure of the disappeared in Colombia to explore the connection between the memory of our dead and national identity. A transgender woman has been murdered in front of Katalina Ángel’s house. In the absence of the authorities, she decides to take responsibility for the body, removing it from the scene and giving it a name, since her identity was never established and she was buried
as unidentified. In the mid-1980s, my uncle, Jorge Arteaga, disappeared. To avoid acknowledging the situation and identifying ourselves as relatives of a disappeared person, we invented fictional stories about his whereabouts for decades. These two stories are interwoven with the testimony of forensic anthropologist Karen Quintero, through whom the country’s current efforts to search for the disappeared are portrayed. Through an essayistic exploration that combines archives, animations, dreams, maps, and various formats, the film helps us understand that Colombia’s history is also the history of its disappeared.