Wafa Mustafa discusses Maybe Tomorrow documentary about her father's disappearance

Channel 4 News broadcast an interview with the Syrian activist Wafa Mustafa about Maybe Tomorrow, a documentary she co-directed with her childhood friend, the filmmaker Waad Al-Kateab. The film follows her search for her father, who was abducted by armed men in Damascus in 2013, and the wider ordeal of families whose relatives disappeared under the Assad regime.

In the interview with Krishnan, Mustafa said her father had told her that if he was arrested again, she had to leave the country. She described him as a role model and said the impact of what he did was bigger than the regime could achieve by disappearing one person.

Channel 4 News reported that Mustafa tried multiple lawyers and paid for information without getting an answer. She said the Assad regime had created an economy around the disappeared, asking families for money for years and sometimes providing false information. She described going to detention centres and morgues in the search for him.

The documentary shows her walking into abandoned prison facilities and searching records. Channel 4 News reported that she found a document with her father's name, which confirmed he had been held at a detention centre but did not reveal his fate. Two photographers documenting prison walls recognised his name and sent her a picture, and she went to see and touch the wall.

In the same interview, Mustafa said she was still where she was two years ago and did not know what had happened to her father. She said she looked to the mothers she met in Syria, who were still fighting for their pain to be seen and acknowledged. She said enforced disappearances were continuing in Syria, including under the new government, and that part of the justice she wanted for her father was for the crime to stop.