TORONTO (CP) - Canadian filmmaker Giselle Portenier hopes her documentary about the sky-high murder rates of women and girls in Guatemala will attract international attention, thereby shaming the government of the central American country to act.

But so far, Portenier says, there isn't much cause for optimism as women from all walks of life in Guatemala continue to be raped and killed at some of the most elevated rates of any country in the world.

"The very first case of 2007 was a seven-year-old girl sent to the store by her mother to buy diapers - she was raped, murdered and beheaded and her body was left in full sight," Portenier said in an interview from her home in east-end Toronto on Wednesday.

"So what kind of culture is it where this is a common occurrence?"

"Killer's Paradise," a National Film Board of Canada co-production with the BBC, has its North American premiere Thursday night in Toronto and six other Canadian cities as part of International Woman's Day. Amnesty International is also kicking off a letter-writing campaign in conjunction with the documentary.

Some of the faces of the documentary will be in Toronto to participate in a panel discussion after the premiere at the downtown Royal Cinema. They include human rights worker Norma Cruz, grieving father-turned-activist Jorge Velasquez and aspiring lawyer Maria Elena Peralta, whose sister, an accounting student, had her throat slit and was stabbed 48 times by unknown thugs five years ago.

"They are the real heroes, because they are risking their lives," said Portenier, a longtime filmmaker and journalist who's won top international honours for her hard-hitting human rights documentaries, including two Peabody awards for "Murder in Purdah" and "Israel's Secret Weapon."

"They are trying to do something in the face of this violence knowing they could lose their own lives for it."

"Killer's Paradise" is a gripping and heartwrenching look at the epidemic of violence against women in Guatemala and the refusal by Guatemalan officials to seriously investigate the crimes or to address the societal and systemic issues thought to contribute to the problem.

It tells a litany of stories of almost unspeakable heartbreak: the opening scene shows the aftermath of a young mother's murder as she walked down the street with her young children, who wonder, as she lies dead on the road, why "Mommy has fallen asleep on the pavement." Her stunned husband points out: "It is the fashion in this country, in this day and age, to kill women."

There's the case of another woman kidnapped in broad daylight just steps from her front door, and her father's sobbing despair that police refused to put up roadblocks to stop the abductors. They told him she was probably just having a fight with her boyfriend - but Titina didn't have a boyfriend, and within hours was found raped, bitten and murdered.

And then there is Velasquez's story. An educated professional with two successful and studious children, his adored daughter simply didn't come home from a party one night and was found raped and murdered the next day.

He had to personally arrange for DNA samples to be collected from two suspects when the police couldn't be bothered, and his in-your-face confrontation with an official in a prosecutor's office is one of the film's most gratifying scenes.

Cruz, who travels across Guatemala trying to educate women on their rights and how to stay safe, sums up the apparent attitude in Guatemala by both the killers and the government.

"To be a woman in Guatemala means to be nothing," she says during the film. "That's why when they kill us, they beat us and they rape us, no one cares."

Portenier says the roots of Guatemalan attitudes towards women are complex, stemming in part from a 36-year civil war that ended a decade ago in which countless women were raped and murdered, coupled with the desire by Guatemalan women to modernize - something that angers men who feel women are forgetting their place.

"It is happening in other countries as well - Colombia, Peru, Nicaragua, Honduras and of course Mexico, but not to the same extent," she says. "It has a lot to do with the culture of violence that is the legacy of the civil war. They were taught to see women as the enemy; it was a deliberate strategy by the military to rape, torture and kill women and no one was brought to justice for any of that."

Guatemala also remains a macho society with laws in place that allow men to rape women so long as they subsequently marry their victims and the girls are over the age of 12, for example. Another law prevents men from being charged with abusing their wives if there's no sign of any injuries 10 days after the attack.

"So what message is that giving?" Portenier says.

Since 2001, more than 2,000 women and girls have been murdered in Guatemala and almost no one convicted of the crimes. The vast majority of the victims were housewives and students, most of them only 16 to 35 years old.

Of the 665 women murdered in 2005 - 10 times the rate in the U.K., by comparison - not a single person has ever been charged.

While there are signs things might be slowly getting better in Guatemala - the 2006 murder rate of women and girls was slightly lower than the astronomical rate of the year before, for example - Portenier is distrustful that any meaningful changes are under way.

"I venture a guess that police are underplaying the statistics because they're beginning to get international pressure on this issue," she says. "I mean maybe they're down, I hope they're down, but I doubt it personally."