“I only had this father, and he was gone”: Wafaa Mustafa’s fight for truth and justice for the missing in Syria | film

WWhen Wafaa Mostafa was a child, she remembers her father playing Umm Kulthum’s music non-stop at home in Syria, harmonizing with the notes of the legendary Egyptian singer. One day, in an attempt to encourage his daughter to appreciate music, he asked her to take a pen and paper and write down the lyrics to a song she liked. Wanting to impress him, Mustafa chose a song by Umm Kulthum called “Aghrd Al-Qaq,” which translates to: “Will I meet you tomorrow?”

“The lyrics are literally about someone who has passed away, about waiting for them and the love you have for them,” Mustafa says. “It’s like I knew what was coming… like I showed my life since I was very young.”

In 2013, as pro-democracy protests spread through the streets of Syria, Ali, Wafa Mustafa’s father, was kidnapped in a Damascus apartment by armed men and taken away. This was the last time he was seen or heard from. Mustafa was 23 years old. Since then, she has been waiting for the tomorrow when she can see her father again, or at least find out what happened to him.

Mustafa’s case is not unique in Syria. According to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, more than 177,000 people were forcibly disappeared between 2011 and 2025 in Syria, most of them arbitrarily arrested and transferred to notorious prisons by Bashar al-Assad regime forces or other armed groups, where they were tortured and often killed, during a conflict that has torn apart most of Syria’s estimated 25 million people.

Now, a year and six months after the fall of the Assad regime, under new ruler Ahmed Al-Sharaa, Mustafa’s mission remains the same: to fight for truth and justice for the forcibly disappeared in Syria, and to ensure that they are not forgotten.

Mustafa has joined forces with her childhood friend, documentary filmmaker Waad Al-Khatib, who co-directed the BAFTA-winning film For Sama, to produce a new short documentary, Maybe Tomorrow – a reference to the Umm Kulthum song that plays in the film and, according to Al-Khatib, “reflects the film and the experience of Wafa and other people in Syria.”

The film, which premieres this evening at Sheffield Duckfest, is an intimate look at what Mustafa calls “the violence of waiting”. It follows her first in Berlin, where she now resides, and then in Syria after the fall of Assad, in her desperate search for information about what happened to her father.

“Millions of people [in the world] “They disappeared,” Mustafa says, “but I only had this father, and he is gone. I cannot let him go.”

The film begins in 2020, at the beginning of Mustafa’s years-long campaign to raise international awareness about the disappeared in Syria. Mustafa was already speaking about these issues at UN meetings, and organized a one-woman vigil outside the courtroom in Koblenz, Germany, where two former Syrian intelligence officers were on trial for state-sponsored torture.

Like the Oscar-nominated For Sama, co-directed by Edward Watts, Al-Khatib wanted this project to be collaborative, but this time with the main protagonist as co-director. While promoting “Sama” in Tunisia, Al-Khatib had a realization.

“I saw the power of what we can do when we own our stories,” she says. “For me, that moment was very big, and I realized that Wafa should make her own film.” “I want you to find your way to how to do this,” she told her friend You “I want to tell this story.”

Mustafa, who has been very active on social media since her childhood and has tens of thousands of followers, said that the film serves as a brief “memoir” of her daily life in the past six years, and depicts the impact of enforced disappearance on families, especially those exiled in different countries.

She hopes that through this film, the audience will be able to glimpse “what it means to have your father disappear and not know what happened – to be told that he is dead, but not being able to accept it. And not being able to because there is nothing to accept.”

The documentary also evokes the impact of such traumatic cases on individual and collective memory. Mustafa’s mother Lofaa says in the film: “Sometimes we forget things, or our memory obscures things. I always remember your father telling you… ‘My daughters, you should write things… document things.’ And so Mustafa does, and she often films herself, or with another cinematographer when Al-Khatib is unable to join her and film her.”

Al-Khatib said: “Hope is a very, very dangerous thing,” warning that Mustafa and the film’s journey do not herald happy endings. “This film is ultimately a tool,” she said. “For Wafa, the impact [it can have] “It’s the goal.”

“The struggle today is not only for truth, accountability, or even fighting for the survival of your loved ones, but also to prove their existence,” says Mustafa. This is especially important in a context in which the authorities have attempted to erase crimes and human rights violations committed in Syria, leaving few ways to learn about what really happened.

Mustafa stressed that enforced disappearance “cannot be normalized,” highlighting that this is “not just a Syrian story, but a universal story of love but also violence, especially on younger women.”

Amnesty International notes that “the vast majority of victims of enforced disappearance globally are men. However, it is women who are more often than not leading the struggle to find out what happened in the minutes, days and years following the disappearance.”

“All these crimes did not end with Assad’s flight from the country and the fall of the Assad regime,” Mustafa says, noting that massacres and enforced disappearances continued during the era of the new Syrian leader. “I don’t want other young women in Syria today to lose their fathers and live their lives feeling guilty and responsible for saving their fathers from the authorities.”

Although it is still difficult for Mustafa to even talk about her father, her love seeps through her actions. “My father was my first companion,” she said.

“Even if Ali Mustafa was not my father, I would definitely have done everything I did for him, because he deserves it. He deserves the world, and he deserves to be remembered.”