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Giselle Portenier |
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Abstract: In this powerful film, the award-winning team of Olenka Frenkiel and Giselle Portenier (Murder in Purdah, Israel’s Secret Weapon) document the story of the brutal killings of women in Guatemala. Since 1999, more than 2,000 women have been murdered there, with the numbers rising every year. In 2005 alone, 640 women, nearly two a day, were killed. That’s one woman in every twelve thousand murdered last year, almost ten times as many, per capita, as in Britain. And in Guatemala, the murders are rarely investigated. Few statistics are kept, details rarely are logged, potential forensic evidence is often ignored or contaminated, so the killers invariably go free and no one, not even the country’s president, has any idea who they are or why so many women are murdered. The answer, at least in part, is the failure of Guatemalan authorities to pursue justice for perpetrators of abuses during a civil war which killed 200,000 people. Three generations of killers have gone free; though the country is trying to show it has changed, old habits die hard. Killer’s Paradise documents the story of Claudina Isabel Velasquez, a 19 year old law student murdered in summer 2005, as her family urges the authorities to investigate who killed her. Distributor: National Film Board of Canada 1123 Broadway, Suite 307 New York, NY 10010 Phone: 212-629-8890 Webpage: http://www.nfb.ca/ Keywords: Guatemala, human rights, women, murder |
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