Last week we were in Madrid, testifying in the Spanish National Court as an expert witness in the Guatemalan genocide case. Kate Doyle has a great overview at "Unredacted." Here's what she wrote about my testimony:

Finally, Pamela Yates, documentary film director and co-founder of Skylight Pictures, provided spell-bounding testimony about her experience filming in Guatemala during the height of the repression during the first half of 1982. The trip resulted in the groundbreaking documentary “When the Mountains Tremble,” but also produced hours of footage not included in the final film. Pam described for Judge Pedraz the consequences of the scorched earth campaign as she witnessed them: accompanying military combat missions into the Mayan regions of the country, interviewing Gen. Benedicto Lucas García and Ríos Montt, and filming a massacre site in Chajul, Quiché in May 1982. As she spoke, she screened selected clips from the film and the additional footage, including interviews she did with the defendants, among other military officers. One of the most striking moments in the testimony came in a clip of Maya-Ixil women grieving for family members killed moments before the film crew arrived. Although the soldiers told the film makers that guerrillas had carried out the massacre, the women shouted into the camera that the soldiers were responsible. Perhaps the soldiers leaning on their weapons nearby didn’t understand Ixil, or perhaps they thought the US film makers wouldn’t have the wherewithal to translate the Mayan language. They were wrong.  

We also filmed at the hearing as part of Granito, our film in development. Definitely read the rest of Kate's informative article at "Unredacted."

• Posted by Pamela
• 11-Dec-2009
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IJCentral is a resource for concerned citizens around the world who want an effective International Criminal Court that will be able to prosecute perpetrators of crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide.  Join the movement for international justice!

Click here to go the IJCentral Website

• Posted by Paco
• 29-Jan-2009
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With support from the Sundance Documentary Film Program’s first round of Audience Engagement grants, we just launched the Quechua version of State of Fear in Peru. A tour of extraordinary public screenings took us through the Andean regions of Ayacucho and Apurimac, both of which suffered the brunt of the violence in Peru’s 20-year war with Shining Path. The Peruvian Truth & Reconciliation Commission (PTRC), whose work State of Fear is based on, found that 70% of the conflict’s more than 69,000 victims, mostly innocent civilians caught in the crossfire, were Quechua speakers – so we felt it was imperative to make a version of the film dubbed into Quechua, to make the findings of the PTRC available to the audience most affected by Peru’s war on terror in the first feature-length documentary ever translated into Quechua.

With support from the Sundance Documentary Film Program’s first round of Audience Engagement grants, we just launched the Quechua version of State of Fear in Peru.  A tour of extraordinary public screenings took us through the Andean regions of Ayacucho and Apurimac, both of which suffered the brunt of the violence in Peru’s 20-year war with Shining Path.  The Peruvian Truth & Reconciliation Commission (PTRC), whose work State of Fear is based on, found that 70% of the conflict’s more than 69,000 victims, mostly innocent civilians caught in the crossfire, were Quechua speakers – so we felt it was imperative to make a version of the film dubbed into Quechua, to make the findings of the PTRC available to the audience most affected by Peru’s war on terror in the first feature-length documentary ever translated into Quechua.

We call the launch EDMQ 2.0 (for Estado de Miedo Quechua, the Spanish title for State of Fear Quechua) because we created a multi-platform website for the project (http://www.edmquechua.com) designed as a hub to engage human rights activists, victims, educators and youth with the social networking power of Web 2.0, using Twitter text messaging technology, photo sharing, Google maps, blogfeeds, and videoclips from the field. We brought FLIP video cameras, simple devices that allow videoclips to be posted directly to the web, which we gave to key local activists and showed them how to upload the clips to the project site.  The FLIP works as a great human rights communication tool, ideal for recording comments and reactions from audience members right after a screening, and then immediately sharing them on the website. Here is an example of one of the first posts, a shot of the hundreds of people that attended the screening in the central plaza of the village of Socos, where the film was projected onto a huge white sheet hanging from the balcony of the Mayor’s office (more clips can be seen on the project site, in Spanish and Quechua):

Reactions to the Quechua version have been passionate and audiences have enthusiastically embraced the film – the impact of seeing their story in their own language can’t be underestimated.  One of the big surprises was the amount of young people that came to the screenings, university students that expressed a desire to use the film to spread knowledge about Peru’s tragic conflict, a conflict that most of them only experienced as children if at all.  It really feels like the rebirth of State of Fear after its original 2005 release in English and Spanish, and surely is the most important version we’ve made, with the promise of a long life in the Quechua-speaking regions of Peru.  In order to make sure that the EDMQ version has as wide a reach as possible, we are promoting the copyleft concept and encouraging people to make as many copies of the film as they need, and download the screening workshop guide from the project web hub.  Human rights organization COMISEDH, our key collaborator in the Ayacucho area, told audience members that if they brought a blank DVD to their offices they would burn them a copy, and they’ve been going like hotcakes.

The initial screenings of EDMQ have stirred controversy, because for the first time Quechua-speaking audiences are able to absorb the groundbreaking conclusions of the PTRC, and human rights activists are planning to use the film for political organizing, especially around the campaign to create an official Register of Victims to claim reparations from the State.  In its Final Report, released in August 2003, the PTRC concluded that the political parties, military, police, insurgent groups (Shining Path and MRTA) and oblivious bystanders of Lima high society all shared the blame for the human devastation, but that the State because it was supposed to protect and not massacre its citizens, bore a special responsibility to compensate the victims.  This has engendered fierce and relentless opposition from the political parties and the military, accusing the PTRC of being pro-terrorist and unpatriotic, accusations that completely distort the conclusions and spirit of reconciliation that animate the Final Report.  No doubt Peru’s current President, Alan García, and Vice-President, Admiral Luis Giampietri, both of whom are implicated in the prison massacre of El Frontón that occurred during García’s first administration (1985-1990), would like to see the Final Report disappear.  But it’s not going away – the PTRC rewrote the narrative of Peru’s 20-year war on terror, and in Quechua it now has a direct connection to those whose lives were most afflicted by the violence.  The regional government of Ayacucho, dominated by President Garcia’s APRA party, already canceled a screening that had been planned for the main plaza of the city.  But COMISEDH and other human rights activists are undaunted – they are taking State of Fear to small communities throughout the region in an ongoing campaign for truth and justice.

With support from the Ford Foundation we assembled the team of Quechua translators for State of Fear, and produced a 2-DVD set (with Quechua & Spanish versions of the film, a short on the ongoing trial of Alberto Fujimori and other extras, and a workshop guide).  We produced 200 copies to distribute to Peru’s Human Rights Coordinating Committee (Coordinadora Nacional de Derechos Humanos), which are being distributed to their 67 member organizations throughout Peru.

• Posted by Paco
• 09-Sep-2008
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The Reckoning was just accepted to the BritDoc 08 Good Pitch”, a special pitching session in Oxford, England designed for social issue documentary projects, with a focus on outreach funding. The International Justice Central/Hub mapping prototype we developed at the BAVC Producer’s Institute will be a central part of our pitch, as will our network of outreach partners! This will provide a good opportunity to raise funds for the outreach campaign. The Good Pitch takes place July 23-25.

• Posted by Paco
• 28-Jun-2008
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I’m immersed at the BAVC Producer’s Institute for New Media, a 10-day think tank where 9 teams of documentary producers, video editors and multimedia developers get together to create projects that seek to extend the reach of social issue documentaries in new media spaces.  Our team will propose an outreach tool we’re calling International Justice Central, or IJ Central, that will be centered on a “live” interactive map we’re designing to be overlaid on Google map technology, and will include…

1. All the locations where the ICC is operating in the world, such as its open cases in Uganda, DRC, Sudan, Central African Republic, and places it is monitoring like Colombia and Afghanistan. Also the headquarters in The Hague and the UN Security Council. The user of the map will be able to click on any of these locations and get a pop-up with more information about the cases or situations, or details about the Court in The Hague and the UN Security Council ICC briefings, incorporating characters from The Reckoning appearing in HD video we’ve shot over the past 2 years.

2. The map will receive real time text messaging pop-ups from cellphone social networks based on Twitter software that we will foster with activists and human rights defenders we’ve met in locations like northern Uganda, DRC, and Colombia, where cellphones are the most ubiquitous communication technology. Text messages from members of these networks will appear on the map at their geographical locations, giving voice to concerns, thoughts and sometimes urgent messages of people on the ground in the situation countries. For an example of a map receiving real time cellphone text messages, go to: http://twittervision.com/

3. The map will receive live news feed pop-ups related to international justice as the stories are posted. For an example of a live news map see: http://next.yahoo.net/download/newsglobe/index.html

4. The map will show all the countries that have joined the ICC and those that haven’t. It will also locate the NGOs that are working to promote the international justice system.

5. By entering your zip code, the map will show a pop-up of your congressperson/senator and their position vis-a-vis the ICC, and link to an email form addressed to the congressperson/senator to advocate for US ratification of the ICC.

6. A separate layer of the map would show locations of all other international justice activities around the world, such as the ICTY, the ICTR, the SCSL, Extraordinary Chambers in Cambodia, Inter-American Court, the Audiencia Nacional in Spain, the Fujimori trial, TRCs, and so forth, giving a comprehensive picture of the international justice movement.

• Posted by Paco
• 03-Jun-2008
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