Doc focuses on missing indigenous women
Zoe Saldana and sisters’ production team behind film about Canadian crisis
A team of filmmakers including “Avatar” star Zoe Saldana are producing a documentary probing the disappearance of Canada’s indigenous women.
“Gone Missing” began life last year, when producer-director Leslie Owen happened on a news story that highlighted 1,200 instances of murdered and missing women.
Since then, Owen has travelled several times to Winnipeg to flesh out her still-in-production documentary, discovering that the scope of the crisis far eclipsed her expectations.
“If this exact same story were being told in a country in Africa, I think we would be paying attention to it and we would be donating money to it,” Owen told the Guardian. “But because it’s in Canada, a first world nation, we don’t want to see it in our own backyard.”
The film is being co-produced by Cinestar Pictures, the company run by Star Trek’s Saldana and her sisters, Mariel and Cisely, and Owen’s own Owen Media Group, which counts as its directors Hollywood stars Elizabeth Banks and Julia Stiles and photographer Nigel Parry.
Owen said the Saldanas, whose first production project was the 2014 TV miniseries “Rosemary’s Baby,” were keenly interested in “women’s rights and women’s issues” and thus felt this project was a perfect fit.
“Gone Missing” focuses on three families, including those close to Tina Fontaine, the 15-year-old who was reported missing 10 days before her body was found wrapped in a duvet cover in Winnipeg’s Red River.
Intending to complete the film in the fall, Owen says she hopes it opens eyes in Canada and abroad.
“In Winnipeg, which is one of the places where I’ve been filming, for many educated indigenous women, there is a fear of getting in taxicabs,” she told the Guardian.
“Who would think that just taking a cab across town, one has to be afraid that somebody is going to lock the doors and drive you away and sexually assault you or take you to someone else or take advantage of you?”