Film Review: Highway of Tears (2014)

In British Columbia, the furthest Western province in Canada, there is a highway that has become known locally as the ‘Highway Of Tears’.  It runs from Prince George inland to Prince Rupert on the coast and is surrounded by blue-collar industrial heartland.  The reason that is has garnered this reputation is due to the tragically high number of abductions and missing persons cases reported there.

Over the past four decades 18 official cold cases had been left unsolved, with as many as 40 unofficial cases attributed to the same highway.  The new documentary from Matthew Smiley tries to tell the stories of some of these women as well as creating a narrative as to why the cases went unnoticed for so long: Institutional racism. 

A large perecentage of the inhabitants of the local area of Highway 16 are Aboriginal People, and due to the change in technology and the economic climate over the last decades the unemployment rate has hit a shocking 92%.  This underemployment has created generational poverty that has devastated the region.  Further to that the film goes back half a century to a time when young Aboriginal children were forcibly removed from their families and placed in residential schools in order to “kill the Indian” within them – An abhorrent form of state racism that was only formally acknowledged and apologised for in 2007.

This racism is made even more explicit within the film when applied to the mainstream press reaction to different people going missing.  When young Aboriginal women were being abducted there was virtually no coverage, but in 2002 when middle-class white teenager Nicole Hoar went missing there was a national outrage.  This is an all to familiar pattern of emphasis on the representation of crime towards different ethnicities, where white victims from privileged backgrounds are given international attention and other people are deemed less deserving.

One of the fathers of a missing teenager says himself that if it hadn’t happened to him then this would just be another “sad thing before turning to page 2 or 3 of a newspaper”.

When the film began I was worried that it was going to be another reverential serial killer narrative that mythologized a person or location in favour of the victims of the crime, but instead the film pans out to be an explicit warning to anyone who lives in the area to think twice before travelling alone.  It acts like a public service broadcast for anyone who is thinking about travelling on that particular highway in order to escape the poverty and head to the city to be vigilant.  The message of the film feels inherently local.

Yet the underlying themes of racism and representation are of much more global significance.  How many times have we seen in the UK attention being given to a young, smiling, blonde, white face that gets plastered all over the news due to some horrific crime?  And how many times do we pretend that the same crime isn’t happening to a whole host of less photogenic victims and going ignored.

This film is chilling for that very reason:  A very local warning but with a very global significance.

The world premiere of the film is at the Toronto International Film Festival screening on 6th March 2014


**Update - on advice from readers, the term 'Aboriginal' has replaced early uses of 'Native American'.  Apologies for the use of earlier language