THIS RIVER

Synopsis

Muddy and long, Winnipeg’s Red River holds dark secrets. When the body of 15-year-old Tina Fontaine was pulled from the waters wrapped in a rubbish bag in 2014, a group of volunteers established Drag the Red, a grassroots initiative to trawl the river in search of evidence of other missing Indigenous women.

Director Biography

Katherena Vermette born to a Métis father and a Mennonite mother, Katherena Vermette grew up in Winnipeg’s predominantly Indigenous North End. “I spent years trying to run away… before I realized there was no other place I wanted to be—or could be, really,” she said in a 2013 interview. North End Love Songs, her first poetry collection, won a 2013 Governor General’s Award, and The Break, her first novel, won a Burt Award for First Nations, Métis and Inuit Literature.