- Director: Pamela Yates
- Country: USA
- Year: 2011
- Length: 100 minutes
- Genre: Documentary
- Screening Times: Thursday, March 8th, 2012 at 8 pm
Co-presented with the Sentinel Project for Genocide Prevention
Synopsis
Part political thriller, part memoir, Granito takes us through a haunting tale of genocide and delayed justice that spans four decades, two films, and director Pamela Yates’ own career. While filming in Guatemala, then under the harsh military dictatorship of General Efraín Ríos Montt, to make her 1982 documentary When the Mountains Tremble, Yates managed to capture the only known footage of the Guatemalan army as it carried out its genocidal campaign against the indigenous Mayan population. Twenty-five years later, this footage becomes evidence in an international war crimes case against the very army commander who permitted Yates to film. Questioning her own role as an ostensibly neutral observer of the conflict and conducting new interviews with activists, witnesses and forensic experts, Yates herself joins this disparate movement of truth-seekers, each of them contributing their own granito, or grain of sand, to the reconstruction of collective memory and the pursuit of justice.
Director’s Bio
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.
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