Pamela Yates’s 500 Years concludes her Guatemalan trilogy; all three films are screening June 11 in the Human Rights Watch Film Festival
WHEN THE MOUNTAINS TREMBLE (Pamela Yates, 1983)
GRANITO: HOW TO NAIL A DICTATOR (Pamela Yates, Peter Kinoy & Paco de Onís, 2011)
500 YEARS (Pamela Yates, 2017)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. at Amsterdam Ave.
Sunday, June 11, 1:30, 3:15, 5:15, $20
Festival runs through June 18
212-875-5601
ff.hrw.org
www.hrw.org
The 2017 Human Rights Watch Film Festival is paying tribute June 11 to Pamela Yates’s Guatemala trilogy with “The Resistance Saga,” with screenings of all three films, a Q&A with the filmmakers and Mayan activists, and a reception featuring a live performance by Mayan singer Sara Curruchich. The opening-night selection of the twenty-second Human Rights Watch Film Festival, Granito: How to Nail a Dictator is an illuminating, if at times overly self-referential, examination of the power of documentary filmmaking. In 1982, Pamela Yates and Newton Thomas Sigel made When the Mountains Tremble, which told the inside story of civilian massacres of the indigenous Maya people as government forces and guerrilla revolutionaries fought in the jungles of Guatemala; one of the film’s subjects, Rigoberta Menchú, became an international figure and went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize. “When I made that film, I had no idea I was filming in the middle of a genocide,” Yates says at the beginning of Granito, which Yates directed with Peter Kinoy and Paco de Onís. A quarter-century after When the Mountains Tremble, Yates was contacted by lawyer Almudena Bernabeu, who asked Yates to comb through her reels and reels of footage to find evidence of the Guatemalan genocide and help bring charges again dictator Ríos Montt, whom Yates had met with back in 1982. In researching the case, Yates speaks with Menchú, forensic archivist Kate Doyle, journalist liaison Naomi Roht-Arriaza, forensic anthropologist Fredy Peccerelli, Spanish national court judge Santiago Pedraz, victims’ rights leader and genocide survivor Antonio Caba Caba, and Gustavo Meoño, a founding member of the Guerrilla Army of the Poor, each of whom sheds light on the proceedings from various different angles, from digging up bones in mass graves to discussing redacted documents that reveal U.S. involvement in Guatemala. Several of them are risking their lives by both continuing to fight the government and appearing on camera. Yates has now completed the trilogy with 500 Years, her seventh film to be shown at the festival, documenting the Mayan resistance that has led to crucial court cases as racism and corruption are brought to light and the Mayan people seek to regain control of their society. “The Resistance Saga” begins in the Walter Reade Theater at 1:30 with When the Mountains Tremble, followed at 3:15 by Granito: How to Nail a Dictator and 5:15 by 500 Years; tickets for all three films, the Q&A, and the reception/concert are $20.