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.

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 Peter Kinoy is no stranger to the Sundance Film festival. He arrives in 2011 with Granito, his sixth feature documentary to grace Park City. Along with long-time collaborator Pamela Yates, Kinoy specializes in long form documentaries on justice and human rights. His films have spanned the globe geographically, covering a wide spectrum of human experience. Kinoy produced and edited When the Mountains Tremble about a revolutionary moment in Guatemala that won a Special Jury Prize at the first Sundance Film Festival in 1984, and returned with Takeover, an inside look at homeless activists in 1990.  He was back at Sundance in 1995 with Teen Dreams, a searing look at young lives on the edge co-produced with Ilan Ziv, that pioneered self-documentation with small format cameras.  With Yates, Kinoy made Poverty Outlaw (Official Sundance Selection 1997) that brought the struggles of poor women organizing to Park City screens.  His most recent Sundance contribution (2009) was The Reckoning: The Battle for the International Criminal Court , an international thriller about the possibilities and pitfalls facing humanity’s quest for international justice. 

Peter has a passion for teaching and has mentored emerging filmmakers at City College of New York, Columbia University, Casa Comal in Guatemala, and at the International School of Film and Television in Cuba.  He was a founder of The Media College of the University of the Poor here in the US.

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 Paco de Onís grew up in several Latin American countries and is multi-lingual. He has just released Granito: How To Nail A Dictator (world premiere at Sundance 2011), a documentary crime investigation story focused on the role of filmic and archival documentation in the prosecution of a genocide case against Guatemalan generals, and launching Granito: Every Memory Matters, a companion transmedia project.  He recently produced The Reckoning: The Battle for the International Criminal Court (world premiere Sundance 2009), accompanied by IJCentral, an interactive audience engagement initiative promoting global rule of law, developed at the BAVC Producer’s Institute in 2008. Prior to that, he produced State of Fear, a Skylight Pictures film about Peru’s 20-year “war on terror” based on the findings of the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission.  

Paco is a partner at Skylight Pictures, and previously produced documentaries for PBS (On Our Own Terms with Bill Moyers), National Geographic (Secrets from the Grave), and a range of other programs. Before producing television documentaries, he created music festivals in South America & the Caribbean, renovated and operated an arts/performance theater in Miami Beach, (The Cameo Theater) and owned and operated a Spanish-style tapas tavern in a 500-year old colonial house in Cartagena, Colombia. 

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