Highway of Tears

Dokumentation
Kanada 2015
Regie: Matthew Smiley
Länge: 80 min
Sprache: Englisch

Man nennt den Highway 16 im Norden der kanadischen Provinz British Columbia «die Autostrasse der Tränen». In vierzig Jahren sind entlang dieser Verbindung zwischen den Städten Prince George und Prince Rupert achtzehn Frauen verschwunden oder umgebracht worden. Die meisten von ihnen sind Indianerinnen. Die Leiche des jüngsten Opfers, Cynthia Frances Maas, wurde im September aufgefunden. Die Polizei gibt sich bisher wenig Mühe die Morde an den Frauen aufzuklären.

Since the late 1960s, at least eighteen young women — many of them from disadvantaged First Nations communities — have disappeared or been found murdered along the 724-kilometre stretch of Highway 16 in northern British Columbia. None of these cold cases were ever solved until 2012, when a special RCMP investigation was able to link DNA from one of the murder victims to deceased US criminal Bobby Jack Fowler; but this single answer has done little to heal the wounds of Aboriginal communities who have seen dozens of their young women vanish along the „Highway of Tears,“ victims not only of murderous predators but of the systemic racism of a federal government that keeps them trapped on impoverished reservations and, as critics charge, evinced little interest in apprehending their killers.