"Finding Dawn" Wins Amnesty International Film Fest Gold

University of Victoria faculty member Christine Welsh recently accepted Amnesty International Film Festival’s gold audience award for her National Film Board documentary “Finding Dawn.”
The Métis filmmaker and UVic professor of women’s studies, documents the experience of Canadian Native women from Vancouver’s downtown eastside, to northern B.C. where nine women have gone missing on the “Highway of Tears”, and Welsh’s home province of Saskatchewan. The film is named after Dawn Crey, one of the estimated 500 Aboriginal women who have gone missing or been murdered over the past 30 years in Canada.
“I made the film to try to put a human face to the epidemic of missing and murdered Native women across Canada; to make the connection between the ‘missing women’ and the pervasive violence that Native women experience in this country on a daily basis; and to show that stopping that violence is everyone's responsibility,” Welsh says.
“Finding Dawn” premiered at the ImagineNATIVE Film Festival in Toronto in October and, in addition to the Amnesty International Film Festival in Vancouver, it was an official selection at the American Indian Film Festival in San Francisco where it screened on November 4.

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