عربي Wafa and her father at a café by the sea

Maybe Tomorrow

Synopsis

Wafa Mustafa has spent years searching for her father.

Wafa Mustafa has spent years searching for her father, who was forcibly disappeared in Syria in 2013. Exiled in Berlin, she keeps his memory alive through activism, storytelling, and unwavering hope. When Bashar Al-Assad’s rule collapses, a rare window opens: an opportunity to finally uncover the truth about her father’s fate.

The award-winning short documentary follows Wafa as she retraces the last known steps of her father, navigating a landscape still scarred by war and oppression. As she moves between prisons, morgues, and silent corridors of power, Wafa confronts the painful realities of post-war Syria, where thousands of families are still searching for their missing loved ones. Through her journey, she joins a generation determined to preserve the narrative, pressure for real change and demand justice.

Filmmakers
Portrait of Wafa Mustafa

Wafa Mustafa

Wafa Mustafa is a Syrian activist and the advocacy and communications manager at The Syria Campaign. After her father was forcibly disappeared by the Assad regime in 2013, she fled Syria to Türkiye before completing her studies at Bard College Berlin.

Portrait of Waad al-Kateab

Waad al-Kateab

Waad al-Kateab is a Syrian filmmaker, journalist, activist and co-founder of Action For Sama. Her films include the Academy Award-nominated and BAFTA-winning For Sama, We Dare to Dream, Death Without Mercy and new short documentary Maybe Tomorrow, co-directed with Wafa Mustafa.

Screenings

Find out where you can catch Maybe Tomorrow around the world as the film continues its festival journey.

More screenings soon.

Take action

Donate to the Ali Mustafa Education Fund to help young people whose parents have been forcibly disappeared access university education in Syria.

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The wider story

“We only exist if we are remembered.”

Enforced disappearance is not only the act of taking someone away. It is a crime designed to erase a person: to remove them from their family, their community and, eventually, from memory.

And the violence does not end with the disappearance. For families, it continues through years without answers: searching, waiting, demanding the truth, and refusing to accept that the people they love can simply vanish without accountability.

At least 177,000 people remain forcibly disappeared in Syria.

That number is not an abstraction. It represents individual lives, families, and more than a decade in which people have been forced to fight for the most basic answers: Where are they? What happened to them? Who is responsible?

Maybe Tomorrow begins with Wafa’s search for her father, Ali Mustafa, but it tells a much wider story. To remember is not only to hold on to someone. It is to insist that they existed, that what happened to them matters, and that truth and justice are still owed.

Learn more about enforced disappearance in Syria

In the media

Coverage will appear here soon.