The Crystal Globe Competition today presents grieving mothers and grieving classmates

A mother searching for her son, who disappeared during Colombia’s armed conflict, and the classmates of a teenager who took his own life. These are the protagonists of today’s Crystal Globe Competition titles, both screening in their world premieres at the Grand Hall: Five Years, Four Months at 5 p.m. and 3 Weeks After at 8 p.m.

Martha, a woman in her forties who has never learned what happened to her son during the Colombian armed conflict, is told that the latest exhumation has yielded no match for his remains. After exhausting every official avenue, she turns to a group of women searching for their missing loved ones. She meets Sandra, who tells her: “In a remote village on the plains, you can ask the dead for a favour.” Together, they set out on a journey in search of answers.

“Five years, Four Months is a fiction originated from a long investigation alongside grassroots organizations of searching women in Colombia. The story of our main character, Martha, holds a mirror to the grief of a nation where over 120,000 people remain victims of enforced disappearance,” say directors Juan Miguel Gelacio and Esteban Hoyos García. They explain that the film seeks to draw attention to several fundamental issues: women bearing the burden of the search, state-perpetrated violence, the state’s failure giving way to a desperate belief in the supernatural, and grief becoming a permanent condition for these women. “We hope this film helps bring visibility to the human heart of the search for missing persons and ensures that these voices are not silenced,” the filmmaking duo adds.

The protagonists of 3 Weeks After are also confronted with a tragic loss: a group of teenagers stranded on a school trip after their bus breaks down. When one of them brings up the recent suicide of their classmate, all the group’s secrets, loyalties and conflicts come to the surface.

“The film is inspired by several true events, but it is not a reconstruction of any single case. It is a film about violence among children, about the cruelty that can appear suddenly, almost casually, in a space where we still expect innocence. What disturbed me most was not only the brutality itself, but the ordinariness around it, the sense that such violence can exist next to everyday life, almost unnoticed, until it becomes impossible to ignore,” says Serbian director Miroslav Terzić.

“I wanted to make a film that looks at this violence not as an isolated incident, but as a reflection of the time we live in. We live in a world where cruelty is often recorded, shared, repeated and transformed into spectacle. The border between victim, witness and perpetrator becomes blurred. Those who commit violence are also marked by it; their actions return to them in another form, often even more destructive,” adds the filmmaker, who already made a name for himself with his previous film Stitches. “3 Weeks After is my attempt to face that darkness, not in order to explain it away, but to ask what kind of world we are leaving to our children.”