Skylight Pictures: News and Production Notes

Rigoberta for President!

I met Rigoberta Menchú 25 years ago, when I was making my first feature length documentary "When the Mountains Tremble". The film tells the story of war and social revolution in Guatemala and the struggle of the largely Indian peasantry against a legacy of state and foreign oppression. Tom Sigel ... read this post

I met Rigoberta Menchú 25 years ago, when I was making my first feature length documentary "When the Mountains Tremble".

The film tells the story of war and social revolution in Guatemala and the struggle of the largely Indian peasantry against a legacy of state and foreign oppression. Tom Sigel (co-director) and I had been filming all sides in the war - the military forces, the guerrillas, and members of civil society. Rigoberta became the protagonist of the film and her personal story was the thread that wove "When the Mountains Tremble" together. She was in exile, and her Spanish was still spotty, but the film helped introduce her to the world and 10 years later she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Now Rigoberta has broken new ground in her lifelong drive to transform Guatemala - she's the first Mayan woman to run for President! I was lucky to be in Guatemala with my filmmaking partners Peter and Paco when she launched her campaign last month with the Encuentro Por Guatemala party - it was an exhilarating feeling to see her waving to crowds from a flatbed truck, in the company of Nineth Montenegro — these are two outstanding women running on a platform of increased rights for poor and indigenous people, and an end to the drug-trafficking mafia that has turned Guatemala into a major transshipment point from Colombia to US markets.

Considering the violent power wielded by criminal drug gangs in Guatemala, this may seem like a quixotic quest, but I admire Rigoberta and Nineth's courageous campaign and wish them great success.

Speaking of quixotic quests, Rigoberta also spearheaded a drive to end impunity for top military leaders and police accused of perpetrating a counter-insurgency war and scorched-earth policy against Guatemalan civilians in the early 1980s. She did this by appealing to the Audiencia Nacional in Spain, the same court that served the arrest warrant for Augusto Pinochet in 1998 under the principle of universal jurisdiction. Under this same principle, the court accepted Rigoberta's argument and issued arrest warrants for the gravest violators on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity, including former president General Efraín Ríos Montt - tough legal battles lie ahead, but the simple fact that these arrest warrants are being upheld is a significant step towards bringing the perpetrators to account. Ríos Montt is also facing charges for crimes against humanity brought against him by the Center for Human Rights Legal Action (CALDH), a tenacious group of human rights advocates that have to work behind double-security doors.

Peter and I decided to make a sequel to the original film because When the Mountains Tremble, and additional hours of "outs" that didn't make it into the final edit had been requested as filmic evidence in the genocide cases. The new film will include these new cases and Guatemala's ongoing transition to democracy and the rule of law, and ponder how a documentary film can make a difference. Here is the trailer to "When the Mountains Tremble":

But this new film will also incorporate When the Mountains Tremble, because 25 years later so many of the original participants in "When the Mountains Tremble" are still players in Guatemala's ongoing political/social drama.

We went to Guatemala recently to lay the groundwork for this new film and found Rigoberta stronger and more active than ever; I reconnected with Frank LaRue, the labor lawyer who for many years lived in exile, and now holds a cabinet position as the President's Human Rights Commissioner; I found former Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP) leader Pablo Ceto training indigenous people on how to run for and assume elected positions in the highlands through his Fundación Maya. I wasn't able to meet again (yet) with former President General Efraín Ríos Montt, but saw "Wanted for Crimes Against Humanity" posters for him even as the city and countryside were plastered with his party's campaign slogans. He has maintained a strong power base all these years, and is running for a congressional seat that he will likely win, which under Guatemalan law would grant him immunity from prosecution. This tension between impunity and the rule of law runs high in Guatemala, and is epitomized by the parallel campaigns of Ros Montt and Rigoberta.

This tension is also revealed in the extraordinary National Police archives unearthed by Guatemalan human rights activists, 80 million documents piled floor to ceiling in an abandoned building surrounded by a police-training base. Some of the people organizing this chaotic trove were formerly targets of the apparatus of state repression who may discover that the disappearance of their family members is detailed in the police documents.

Probably my most disarming discovery was to find "Rafael" (his nom de guerre), a former guerrilla in the squad that shot down the military helicopter I was riding in (and filming from) in 1982. As destiny would have it General Benedicto Lucas García, the feared head of the Guatemalan Armed Forces, was piloting the helicopter.

Due to our emergency landing and the near death experience we shared, the General took me into his confidence, which enabled me to document in words and images the Armys genocidal scorched earth policy against the Mayan civilian population in the highlands and bring it to the attention of the world. Now General Lucas García is one of those charged in the warrants issued as a result of Rigoberta's tireless pursuit of justice.

So this is the panorama in today's Guatemala that will be woven with "When the Mountains Tremble" to create our new film, which we are calling "Granito."

Hide this post

Art & Soul & Documentaries in the Land of Eternal Spring

I call the course "The Art and Soul of Documentary Editing." I am working with a group of young people on an intensive one-week workshop at Casa Comal, a community media center in Guatemala City. ... read this post

I call the course "The Art and Soul of Documentary Editing." I am working with a group of young people on an intensive one-week workshop at Casa Comal, a community media center in Guatemala City.

For seven years Casa Comal has almost single-handedly built a skills base in cinema basics among young people here. I first met the "Comales" (as they call themselves) four years ago when they invited me to show our 1983 release "When the Mountains Tremble" in its first public presentation in Guatemala, after having been informally banned for 20 years, seen only in clandestine screenings during that time. It was an unforgettable night, but that's another story. Suffice it to say that I'd been looking for a way to come back to Guatemala and do something with Casa Comal ever since.

So when Skylight Pictures decI'ded to return to Guatemala to continue an exploration begun 20 years earlier with "When the Mountains Tremble," I contacted Casa Comal's two founding leaders, Elias Jimenez and Rafael Rosal, and we cooked up this course. Casa Comal has taken on the task of raising the level of independent film not only in Guatemala but also throughout Central America. They have a year-round school to train students, a production unit that produces an independent feature film a year (in a country where you can count homegrown features on one hand) and they organize the fabulous Icaro film festival with participants from across Central America.

My workshop lasts a week. In that short time I present the methodology of documentary editing, and the students divI'de up to work on four Adobe Premiere edit systems, each group using the same batch of footage used to create a scene in our last film, "State of Fear."

Squeezed in the mI'ddle somewhere Casa Comal has me speak on their weekly cultural radio show. Then on the last day we watch each group's cut, after which I reveal the scene I had cut for "State of Fear" from the same footage. And alongsI'de the craft there are passionate discussions of "what is a documentary" and "what is the responsibility of the documentary filmmaker."

Guatemala has almost no independent documentary tradition, and needs it badly. But then I suppose that might be saI'd about a great many places in this beautiful and troubled world.

Hide this post

Invisibles

The Tribeca Film Festival is in full swing here in NY, and we just watched a remarkable film (actually five short films by five directors, produced by Spanish actor Javier Bardem in association with Doctors Without Borders) about invisible victims of conflict and disease in five different countries. This may ... read this post

On Police States & Courage

I've been struck by the recent spate of films that tell stories of police states and the courage of individuals that defy them. In the narratI've fiction realm there were two magnificent films nominated for Academy Awards: Pan's Labyrinth and The LI'ves of Others (both won Oscars in different categories). In ... read this post

but both lead us into inspiring, if bittersweet, tales of the courage of convictions and the illuminating spirit of individuals who band together to defy brutal oppression, one during the 1940s in Franco's fascist Spain, the other during the 1970s and 80s in East Germany when the Stasi secret police ruled daily life. Pamela and I are currently at the Montreal Human Rights Film Festival, where we saw an eye-opening short film called Democracy 76: My State of Emergency, about the Egyptian police state and the relentless violence, intimidation and torture it used against dissidents during the run up to the 2005 "elections" called with 3 months notice — several Egyptian dissidents interviewed in the film mentioned how difficult it was to overcome the "fear factor," as they called it, to protest this inherently flawed election, yet they kept going into the streets, knowing they would likely get beaten or arrested or even killed, as so many did.

Here is the film:

During the international outreach campaign we did after releasing State of Fear we crossed paths a couple of times with Tanya Lokshina, a Russian human rights activist who reminds us of those courageous individuals we see in the films.

The first time we met Tanya was in Moscow at a State of Fear screening where our Q&A session was shut down when audience members started comparing President Putin's expansion of power to President Fujimori's power grab in Peru in the 90s. Tanya had been instrumental in getting State of Fear shown in Moscow, along with Yuri Dzhibladze (another dedicated human rights defender). After the startling shutdown of our Q&A we went to a restaurant where we learned just how precarious it is to be a human rights defender in Russia today: click here to listen to this recent NPR story where Tanya is interviewed, and you'll get a sense of the courage it takes to continue speaking truth to power in Putin's Russia.

The second time we crossed paths with Tanya (and Yuri) was at

the Human Rights Defenders Policy Forum at the Carter Center in Atlanta in May 2006. This is a remarkable annual gathering of human rights defenders from all over the world, hosted by President Jimmy Carter (and on this occasion co-hosted by Louise Arbour, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights) and co-organized by Human Rights First. We were there to screen State of Fear, and spent 2 days listening to about 30 fellow human rights defenders from all over the globe tell tales of resistance to abuses of power - one of the most effectI've human rights tools is the documentation and airing of these abuses, which is what we do in our human rights work through film. We were inspired by the stories of our colleagues, and salute the Carter Center and Human Rights First for bringing us all together.

Hide this post

Obstinate Memory

Some films inspire me; keep my imagination alive, my life rich. And of all these films there is one that keeps my dreams for a better, peaceful, more just world seem possible. I go back to it often in these dark days. It is Chile, Obstinate Memory by Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzmán. Patricio has ... read this post

Patricio has turned the seminal trauma of his youth, the death of President Salvador Allende in a coup d'etat and the subjugation of Chile's long-established democracy by General Augusto Pinochet, into a meditation on memory and forgetting. During the Pinochet dictatorship, the military's version of history was imposed, where they appeared as the heroic guardians of social order. Like a messenger from the past, after 23 years in exile Patricio returns to Chile with The Battle of Chile, his unflinching chronicle of the long-ago coup d'etat. Censored for all these years, Patricio shows the film for the first time to a generation raised under military rule, jarring their conscience and questioning their collective memory. Obstinate Memory creates a dynamic tension between the older generation that lived through the creation and then brutal destruction of a popular democratic movement, and the younger generation that has been taught that the destruction of this movement was necessary to save Chile from chaos and Communism.

Obstinate Memory is brilliant personal cinema of universal dimensions. Patricio sparsely narrates the film. His emotional restraint yet deep connection is felt in every slow dolly, every extreme close up, and in every silence. He weaves personal stories of courage and resistance to the coup d'etat with older people's ideas about the meaning of memory. José Balmes, the Chilean artist who has done a series of paintings based on photographs from the day of the coup, finds that, "Memory and forgetting are recurrent questions. Like the positive and the negative, the action and thought, of human beings during their lifetime." Or Ernesto, the soulful teacher at the heart of the film who simply says, "Recordar (Spanish for remembering) comes from the Latin re and cordum, the heart. Re return. Which means, returning to the heart to wake up again."

I was a young photojournalist working in Chile during the last year of the Popular Unity government of Salvador Allende (the subject of Guzman's The Battle of Chile). What I saw, what I absorbed, what I learned in that year has inspired all the films Ive made from When the Mountains Tremble to State of Fear and now The Court of Last Resort. So Chile is an obstinate memory for me too. It breathes life and hope into the darkest moments, because it was a time when people dared to dream of justice, the right to an education, good health and a roof over all heads. It was a noble dream. The failure of that dream was hard to take. As Ernesto, the charismatic teacher in the film says, "You can't progress without dreams. Because dreams are the way we understand life."

10 years after Obstinate Memory was finished General Pinochet was facing trial for corruption and human rights violations before he passed away, and Michele Bachelet, a former torture victim whose father was killed by the military regime, became President. The dream may yet flourish a quarter century later, because the memory was kept alive.

Patricio Guzmán dedicates Obstinate Memory to his daughters Andrea and Camila. Camila is a filmmaker whose debut documentary The Sugar Curtain premiered at the Toronto Film Festival. And Andrea is part of the DocuSur team, a vibrant Spanish film festival dedicated to the genre of documentary filmmaking. The dream lives on.