Missing

In October 1966, eight-year-old Wendy Jane Pfeiffer was abducted near her parents’ farm in the Adelaide Hills, South Australia. This web documentary reconstructs the search for the girl, narrated by the man who eventually found her: Jimmy James, a highly experienced tracker from the Pitjantjatjara people of the Central Australian desert.

After a fruitless combing operation, the police asked James and his tracking partner, Daniel Moodoo to help find Wendy’s body, but the two men soon concluded that she was still alive. In six chapters, James explains the tracks that showed them the way, and the clues that told them about Wendy’s condition. Fifty-two years later, we see how the search unfolded through a collage of photos of the sites where the tracks were found.

In this animated oral history, the memories of the tracker and of Wendy herself intertwine, emphasizing the unique relationship between the two. The images are dominated by the location: the forest that surrounds the narrators and all of us watching.