Anthropology News

Since 1999 more than two thousand women have been murdered in Guatemala, with the numbers escalating every year. Yet, lawmakers and government officials continue to turn a blind eye. Powerful and uncompromising, Killer’s Paradise uncovers one of the most emotionally-wrenching hidden human rights abuses taking place, while exposing the impunity allowed by an inept judicial system. With its history of almost four decades of civil war, Guatemala is a troubled society but it can also be seen as a microcosm of the pervasive violence and injustice against women that exists in the world today.

Acclaimed Métis filmmaker Christine Welsh presents a compelling documentary that puts a human face on a national tragedy: the murders and disappearances of an estimated 500 Aboriginal women in Canada over the past 30 years. This is a journey into the dark heart of Native women’s experience in Canada. From Vancouver’s Skid Row to the Highway of Tears in northern British Columbia to Saskatoon, this film honours those who have passed and uncovers reasons for hope.

Vendetta Song is the story of her incredible voyage–a riveting account of a senseless vendetta killing, the antiquated customs that brought it about and one woman’s search for connection and closure in a Kurdish culture she’s never known.

Working against time, political instability and facing possible retribution for her investigation, Eylem follows a series of word-of-mouth clues, venturing from village to village as she pieces together Guzide’s final days and closes in on the identity of her killer. Amazingly, Vendetta Song brings Eylem face to face with one of the men she suspects is her aunt’s murderer. It is 30 years later. Can the vendetta finally be laid to rest?

Juarez is a feature length documentary that shows the theories found by family members of the victims, forensics, journalists, artists and activists in Mexico, questioning why the federal government hasn’t intensified its interest to thoroughly investigate the brutal murders of over 460 women in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua.
Juarez exposes the high levels of corruption and violence in Mexico, which have led to increasing violence and murders against women. Also, the documentary shows several interviews to the children of some of the murdered women of Juarez. They are the other victims of the femicide.

Backyard is a fictional account of the atrocities that continue to occur in Ciudad Juárez. We follow police officer Blanca Bravo (an astonishing performance by Ana de la Reguera), who is sent to Ciudad Juárez from Mexico City to investigate a series of murders of young women. Most of the victims are low-paid labourers who have been drawn to Ciudad Juárez by the possibility of work at American-owned factories, or maquiladoras, that sprang up on the Mexican side of the border after the NAFTA agreement went into effect. Blanca discovers an incompetent and complicit police force and an indifferent local population, embodied by entrepreneur Mickey Santos (a chilling performance by Jimmy Smits).Presented as a fiction, Carrera’s film is all the more moving given that the events he recounts are based on true stories and touch upon the various theories that have been put forward as to the cause of the murders. Hypotheses range from a serial killer, to drug cartels, to the more abstract pains of globalization, and it is easy to see how any of these factors could be at work in this Mexican town, which is a backyard to El Paso, Texas. Through his film, Carrera is able to denounce culprits who have never been brought to justice. However, the most devastating truth he illuminates is that these murders continue to happen because they have become commonplace. Today, some men kill women in Ciudad Juárez simply because they can.