Acclaimed Feminist Filmmaker To Screen “Finding Dawn”

Métis writer and filmmaker Christine Welsh screens her feature-length film “Finding Dawn”—about the disappearance and murder of aboriginal women in British Columbia—on May 13, 3:30 p.m. at the Knight Library Browsing Room on the University of Oregon campus. Sponsored by the Center for the Study of Women in Society, this free event will include a discussion session with the filmmaker.

They were poor, mostly indigenous. Some were sex workers. More than 500 missing, murdered, gone over a 30-year period. “Finding Dawn,” a National Film Board of Canada (NFB) documentary made in 2006, follows the lives of three women believed to be among the victims—Dawn Crey, Ramona Wilson and Daleen Kay Bosse.

A Film by Christine Welsh

Why do these murders and disappearances remain unsolved and unpunished? In “Finding Dawn,” Welsh undertakes what the NFB describes as an “epic journey” to shed light on the mystery and horror of a too often untold story—“a worldwide culture of impunity” that allows violence against women. Welsh begins at Vancouver’s skid row where more than 60 poor women disappeared, and travels the “Highway of Tears” in northern British Columbia where more than two dozen women have vanished.

Christine Welsh is an associate professor at the University of Victoria, where she teaches courses in Indigenous Women’s Studies and Indigenous Cinema. She has been producing, writing and directing films for more than 30 years.