In Bosnia in the years after the 1992–95 war, as mass graves are finally exhumed, a Polish reporter follows a handful of mostly Muslim women searching for the remains of husbands and sons, working alongside forensic anthropologist Dr. Ewa Klonowski. Told in short, object-titled fragments with no first-person narrator, this is reportage closer to testimony than conventional storytelling.
When the dead vanish into mass graves, mine shafts and dumps, the living cannot start mourning. They are stuck waiting and searching, sometimes for years. Only identifying the remains and burying them lets the grieving finally begin.
When the men are killed or taken away, nearly all the testimony and searching falls to women. They are the ones who describe being separated from husbands and sons and who go looking for the remains. Even on the side that did the killing, it is women who speak to outsiders while men hide their faces and disappear.
A war leaves even the side blamed for it poor, under threat and full of regret. People there end up asking what the point of it all was. Seeing their ruin alongside the victims' suffering complicates any simple story of winners and losers.