Director: Pamela Yates | USA/Guatemala/Spain | Documentary | 2011 | 103 mins + 6 mins addendum
Film source: Filmmakers
Sponsor: Green Valley Media
Filmmaker will attend, post screening Q&A
In 1982, a young first-time filmmaker, Pamela Yates, gained unprecedented access to Ríos Montt, his generals and leftist guerrillas waging a clandestine war deep in the mountains. The resulting film, When the Mountains Tremble (1983) revealed that the Guatemalan army was killing Mayan civilians. 30 years later former Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt found himself indicted by a Guatemalan court for crimes against humanity, Against all odds, he was charged with committing genocide in the 1980s against the country’s poor, Mayan people. Some of the evidence against him came from outtakes in Yates’s early film. Granito: How To Nail a Dictator is a film about a film and its remarkable afterlife for a filmmaker, a nation and, most dramatically, as evidence in a long struggle to give a dictator’s victims their day in court. The Q&A will be followed at 4pm by the launch of a a new initiative for the digitization of Vermont films and the importance of archival footage.
About the filmmaker:
Pamela Yates is an American documentary filmmaker. She was born and raised in the Appalachian coal-mining region of Pennsylvania but ran away at the age of 16 to live New York City.
Yates is a co-founder of Skylight Pictures (with Peter Kinoy), a company dedicated to creating films and digital media tools that advance awareness of human rights and the quest for justice by implementing multi-year outreach campaigns designed to engage, educate and activate social change.
Four of Yates’ films as a Director – When the Mountains Tremble; Poverty Outlaw; Takeover, and The Reckoning: The Battle for the International Criminal Court — were nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, and When the Mountains Tremble won the Special Jury Award in 1984. Her film, State of Fear: The Truth about Terrorism, has been translated into 47 languages and broadcast in 154 countries. Her most recent directorial effort, The Reckoning: The Battle for the International Criminal Court (ICC), is an epic tale about the first six tumultuous years of the ICC, filmed across 4 continents in 6 languages over 4 years.
She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in support of her current Sundance offering,Granito a feature-length documentary that is part political thriller, part memoir, transporting audiences through a riveting, haunting tale of genocide and justice spanning four decades. She also directed the development of Granito:Every Memory Matters, a transmedia project using mobile applications to restore the collective memory of the Guatemalan genocide.
Yates recently completed Disruption (2014), a documentary which explores innovative strategies to reduce poverty through women’s economic empowerment in Latin America. She is currently working on 500 Years, the third in a triology of films (following When the Mountains Tremble and Granito), which explores the battle for the national narrative in present-day Guatemala.