Showtime revealed the official trailer for Murder in Big Horn, a new documentary exploring the deaths of a group of Native American women in rural Montana, making its premiere at Sundance Film Festival 2023.
Directors Razelle Benally and Matthew Galkin craft a powerful portrait of tribal members and their communities within Big Horn County, Montana battling an epidemic of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) that has been prevalent since colonization. The three-part docuseries examines the circumstances surrounding many of these cases, told solely through the perspectives of those involved: Native families, Native journalists, and local law enforcement officers.
Following its world premiere at Sundance Film Festival on Sunday, January 22, Murder in Big Horn will make its Showtime debut on demand and on streaming Friday, February 3 and on-air on Sunday, February 5 at 10 p.m. ET/PT.
Within the past decade, dozens of young Indigenous women and girls from the Crow and Northern Cheyenne Nations have disappeared from Montana’s Big Horn County and its surrounding areas. Grieving Native families who fear the worst press local law enforcement for answers, but their pleas are most often met with silence or indifference. Arrests in these cases are rare, and convictions are virtually nonexistent. Elsewhere in America, similar stories of disappearances and death shock communities and become nationwide news, but when they occur on Native land, a circle of bereft family members, friends, and activists are left to fight for justice on their own. Murder in Big Horn intimately embeds with these families and this community in an effort to shine a light on the unanswered mysteries of this land.
Oglala Lakota/Diné filmmaker Razelle Benally wrote for the noir Navajo Tribal Police investigation drama series Dark Winds. Benally was a Sundance Native Lab fellow, a Creative Producers fellow, and a Screenwriters Intensive fellow and is pursuing an MFA in film production at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. She is currently in development on her directorial feature film debut.
Matthew Galkin’s recent directing work includes the Showtime limited series Murder In The Bayou, Kevorkian, the award-winning documentary I Am an Animal: The Story of Ingrid Newkirk and PETA, and loudQUIETloud: A Film About the Pixies.
Watch the official trailer for Murder in Big Horn.