A Colombian documentary on the disappeared arrives with a political warning attached

On 6 July 2026, Variety published an interview with co-director Esteban Hoyos García of the documentary Five Years, Four Months, a film built around the mothers of Colombia's disappeared — women who have spent years, often decades, walking riverbanks, climbing into mass graves, and petitioning a state that has, in their telling, frequently looked away. The interview lands at a charged political moment: the country is preparing to hand the presidency to a right-wing successor, and the filmmakers are blunt about why that matters for the film's subjects. The mothers in the film are not a historical footnote. They are still searching.

The documentary is the work of director Juan Miguel Gelacio, with Hoyos García as co-director, and the interview treats it as both a piece of cinema and an act of political timing. The title itself is a count — five years and four months — a marker of how long one mother, by the film's account, has been looking for her son. Across Colombia, the search has become a women's movement, organised in public and largely ignored by the political class for most of the country's recent history. Five Years, Four Months is the argument that the looking should not stop when the cameras do.

The story behind the film

Gelacio began the project, according to the Variety interview, by listening. He thought the stories would make a documentary — interesting, contained, finishable. They were not contained. As he heard more, the film changed shape, and Hoyos García came on as co-director. The result is a work that treats the search for the disappeared as ongoing, not as a settled chapter of the Colombian past. The interview is explicit about that framing: the urgency, Hoyos García says, is the urgency of remembering, and the film's political weight comes from the calendar it lands on.

Colombia's armed conflict produced one of the largest populations of the disappeared in the Western Hemisphere. The exact toll is contested — the country's official reckoning is still incomplete, and the Variety interview does not put a single number on the body count — but the search collectives, the mothers' groups that organise in plazas and outside morgues, have long insisted that the official figures are conservative. The film positions those collectives as protagonists, not as victims, and the political implication is that a state which treats their work as marginal is a state that has made a choice.

The political weather

The right-wing presidency referenced in the Variety piece is the immediate frame. Colombia's outgoing administration, centred on the Pacto Histórico coalition that brought Gustavo Petro to office in 2022, made the search for the disappeared a stated priority of its peace and transitional-justice agenda. A successor government of a different political stripe inherits that file, and the filmmakers are warning — in the measured language of a Variety interview, not a manifesto — that the file is at risk of being closed by attrition. Funding dries up. Commissions get renamed. Units are transferred. None of it is dramatic. All of it adds up.

The counter-narrative, which the interview does not endorse but which any honest reading of Colombian politics has to acknowledge, is that the new administration will inherit an economy under pressure, a security situation in several rural departments that has not stabilised, and a peace process that has produced less than its architects promised. A government facing those conditions may argue, with some plausibility, that transitional-justice budgets compete with rural security and basic services. The mothers would respond — and the film, by its title, is already responding — that five years and four months is not a budget line. It is a person.

What the film is doing that the official record is not

Documentary film in Colombia has long done work that the state has refused to. The country's most-watched films of the last two decades — the work of Ciro Guerra, Cristina Gallego, César Augusto Acevedo, and others — have functioned as parallel archives, recording what official commissions have either missed or been told to leave alone. Five Years, Four Months sits inside that tradition. The interview frames the project as an act of preservation against an incoming political environment that the filmmakers expect to be less hospitable to the search.

The structural pattern is worth naming plainly. Across Latin America, transitions of government have repeatedly rewritten the terms of who counts as a victim. In Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Guatemala, Peru, and now in Colombia, the bureaucratic infrastructure of memory — the commissions, the special units, the dedicated budget lines — has been built up under one political coalition and partially dismantled under the next. The film arrives in the United States and Europe, where Colombian cinema has an attentive audience, at exactly the moment when that dismantling is most likely to begin at home. International visibility, the filmmakers appear to understand, is itself a form of protection. A disappearance that is being filmed is harder to bury twice.

The stakes

The mothers in Five Years, Four Months are not asking the incoming government for something it cannot afford. They are asking it to continue a search that the previous government began. The film's wager is that the audience — Colombian, hemispheric, global — will treat that modest request as politically serious rather than as a sentimental footnote to a peace process that the international press has largely moved on from. The interview does not name specific policies the new administration should adopt. It does not need to. The point is that the search has to survive the transition, and that cinema, at this moment, is one of the few mechanisms that can carry it across.

What remains uncertain — and the Variety interview does not pretend otherwise — is whether the new government will frame the disappeared as a legacy file to be closed or as a live obligation. The mothers in the film are not waiting for the answer. They are still looking.

Desk note: Monexus covered this as a culture story with explicit political stakes, not as a film review. The wire treatment of the documentary emphasised the interview; we extended it to the political transition the filmmakers themselves flagged, on the principle that a work of memory released at a moment of power change is itself a political document.