Montreal Sisters in Spirit Vigil 2024

Rebecca Belmore’s performance art on a street corner in Vancouver’s Downtown East Side poignantly memorializes the missing and murdered Indigenous women by engaging in symbolic acts of scrubbing the streets, lighting candles, and tearing her red dress as a metaphor for their shattered lives, ultimately empowering their memory through vocal and visual tributes.

This film tells the story of the survivor of a brutal, racially-driven sexual assault who becomes a motorcycle-riding, ass-kicking vigilante after the justice system fails her, taking on the attackers of other women who have suffered the same fate. The film shares its name with a short story from 1893 written by Emily Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake).