"Granito"

"Granito," was presented at this year's Sundance Film Festival. Pamela Yates's first film about Guatemala was her award winning film When the Mountains Tremble (1982). In Granito, Yates documents how her first film and related outtakes are being used as evidence in the international war crimes case against Efrain Rios Montt in Spain. 

In GRANITO our characters sift for clues buried in archives of mind and place and historical memory, seeking to uncover a narrative that could unlock the past and settle matters of life and death in the present. Each of the five main characters whose destinies collide in GRANITO are connected by the Guatemala of 1982, then engulfed in a war where a genocidal “scorched earth” campaign by the military exterminated nearly 200,000 Maya people. Now, as if a watchful Maya god were weaving back together threads of a story unraveled by the passage of time, forgotten by most, our characters become integral to the overarching narrative of wrongs done and justice sought that they have pieced together, each adding their granito, their tiny grain of sand, to the epic tale.

Skylight Pictures provides both two- and ten-minute trailers.


Granito trailer from Skylight Pictures on Vimeo.



GRANITO 10min from Skylight Pictures on Vimeo.


See also the National Security Archives's Guatemala Project with details on Plan Sofia and the genocide case in Spain.

Here's a review of the film by Stephen Farber.