Highway of Tears is a Canadian film that investigates a tragic reality shared in the United States. Since the late 1960s, at least eighteen young women — many of them from disadvantaged First Nations communities — have disappeared or been found murdered along a remote stretch of highway in British Columbia. None of these cold cases were solved until recently. Those recent investigations have done little, however, to heal the wounds of Aboriginal communities who have seen dozens of their young women vanish along the “Highway of Tears.” 

Narrated by Nathan Fillion, Matt Smiley’s hard-hitting documentary not only movingly relates the personal stories of the victims, but investigates how the legacy of generational poverty, high unemployment and endemic violence in their communities contributed to their tragic fates — and how contemporary First Nations leaders are striving to cure those ills.