In the Wake TV Producers Shayna and Julia discuss Como si la tierra se las hubiera tragado ("As If the Earth Had Swallowed Them"), filmmaker Natalia León's powerful animated short that confronts the epidemic of missing women and girls in Mexico—a crisis that remains largely invisible in mainstream discourse.
Animation as Truth-Telling: León's film emerged from her own reckoning with a reality her parents shielded her from as a child in Mexico. After moving to France at 17 to pursue her studies, she gained perspective on the violence she'd been surrounded by but never fully understood. Her protagonist returns home and connects the signs for missing women and girls to ones she saw as a child—finally comprehending what she'd witnessed all along. Animation gave León the freedom to express the anxiety, fear, and emotional weight of researching this crisis and understanding the systemic nature of femicide in her homeland.
Why This Matters: The disappearance of women and girls—particularly in Mexico, but also across Latin America, Indigenous communities, and Black communities worldwide—is an ongoing humanitarian crisis met with silence, indifference, and victim-blaming. Shayna and Julia's conversation challenges audiences to ask: Why aren't we talking about this more? Why do certain lives disappear without headlines, without investigations, without justice? Art like León's forces us to see what systems of power want us to ignore.
Watch the full conversation as Shayna and Julia explore the power of animation in confronting difficult truths, the global crisis of missing women and girls, and why we must demand better from media and governments alike.
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