Director: Matthew Smiley
Country: Canada
Genre: Documentary
Editor’s Notes: The following review is part of our coverage for TIFF’s Human Rights Watch Film Festival which runs until March 6th at TIFF Bell Lightbox. For more information on upcoming TIFF film series visit http://tiff.net and follow TIFF on Twitter at @TIFF_NET.
In the province of British Columbia in Canada there is a stretch of highway (16) that leads from Prince George to Prince Rupert that has become know informally as the ‘Highway Of Tears’. It has garnered this gruesome epithet due to a series of unsolved murders that are attributed to the area: a majority of which are of Aboriginal people, all of which are women.
Matthew Smiley’s new documentary tries to tell some of the stories of the young girls who have gone missing and acts as a kind of public service announcement to increase awareness of the dangers of the area.
Due to the geography of the region a lot of the industry has revolved around natural resources, such as gas and other mining. Over the years these industries have developed and changed leading to an inexorable rise in the unemployment rate – reaching as high as 92% in some of the areas.
This lack of local economic opportunity has forced younger people to migrate into the cities, often hitchhiking as a form of transport due to the poor infrastructure available. This has led to a disturbingly high abduction rate along the main highway and to a number of unsolved missing persons cases.
Matthew Smiley’s new documentary tries to tell some of the stories of the young girls who have gone missing and acts as a kind of public service announcement to increase awareness of the dangers of the area. The darker undercurrent to the narrative focuses on the difference between the lack of mainstream, media coverage of the young aboriginal women who go missing, versus the saturation of coverage of the middle-class white women. This obvious discrepancy is entirely predictable but nonetheless shocking when put side by side.
This obvious discrepancy is entirely predictable but nonetheless shocking when put side by side.
A tragic backdrop to the film goes back half a century to when Native American children were taken to residential schools in order to ‘kill the Indian’ within them – a heinous practice that has only been formally recognized and apologized for by the government in 2007. This is used as a kind of precedent that has been set for how ethnic aboriginal people have been treated in modern Canada, so it is unsurprising that less attention is paid to their plight in the media.
Some of the cases highlighted here go back as far as 1969 and although there has been arrests, some Aboriginal community leaders put the estimate as high as 40 or more women who have disappeared.
As a warning about a specific geographical area, the film should be seen and talked about by as many West coast Canadians as possible; but as a film that carries larger themes of media representations and race, this is a film for all of North America.
[notification type=”star”]75/100 ~ GOOD. As a warning about a specific geographical area, the film should be seen and talked about by as many West coast Canadians as possible; but as a film that carries larger themes of media representations and race, this is a film for all of North America.[/notification]
