(PDF) (DOC) (JPG)November 7, 2011

(Left to Right) Director Pamela Yates & Producer Paco de Onis

(MAHWAH, NJ) – Director Pamela Yates and Producer Paco de Onís screened and led a discussion of their film Granito: How to Nail a Dictator at Ramapo College of New Jersey on November 7. The program was sponsored by the Gross Center for Holocaust and Genocide and the Communications Major’s Cinematheque Series. It received Plantinum funding from the Division of Student Affairs. More than 150 students, faculty and community members attended the screening.

This film is part political thriller and part memoir. It transports viewers back in time through a haunting tale of genocide in Guatemala and returns to the present with a cast of characters joined by the quest to bring a dictator to justice. One of those characters was Yates herself who as a young filmmaker was able to document the dictatorship’s murderous campaigns in areas inhabited by the country’s native peoples.

Not surprisingly, several questions from the largely student audience centered on Yates’ own role in the film, especially in putting herself at great risk in filming both the sequences with the indigenous redoubt and the military going into the jungle to destroy them. In a matter of fact way, Yates pointed out that she was very young at the time and she just had to compartmentalize her fear. Questions also arose about U.S. involvement in the counter-insurgency that, Yates pointed out, was confirmed on film by the general commanding the Guatemalan Army raids on the native encampments.

A co-founder of Skylight Pictures, the documentary production company based in New York City that made Granito, Pamela Yates grew up in Western Pennsylvania and studied film at New York University. Granito, as all of Yates’ films, has garnered critical acclaim and was an official selection included in the Premiere Documentary Section of the 2011 Sundance Film Festival. Four of her films were nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, and one film won the award in 1984.

Her film, State of Fear: The Truth about Terrorism, a film about Peru’s 20-year “war on terror” based on the findings of the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, won the 2006 Overseas Press Club Award for “Best Reporting in Any Medium on Latin America. Her film, The Reckoning, released in 2009, is about the work of the International Criminal Court. Yates also received a Guggenheim Fellowship for her work on Granito.

De Onís grew up in several Latin American countries. Prior to Granito, his most recent production was The Reckoning and he previously produced State of Fear. He has also produced documentaries for PBS (On Our Own Terms with Bill Moyers), National Geographic (Secrets from the Grave), New York Times Television (Police Force, Paramedics), and MSNBC (Edgewise with John Hockenberry).

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