For 25 years Skylight Pictures has been committed to producing artistic, challenging and socially relevant independent documentary films on issues of human rights and the quest for justice. Through the use of film and digital technologies, we seek to engage, educate and increase understanding of human rights amongst the public at large and policy makers, contributing to informed decisions on issues of social change and the public good.
With New York in the grip of winter, we (Peter Kinoy and Pamela Yates) went out with our union brothers and sisters to walk the Writers Guild picket lines.
From HBO, to Viacom, to the Time-Warner Center, the writers are asking for a fair share of the profits they help create. The principal reason the Writers Guild is on strike is that we want a fair share of the income generated by programs we create that are increasingly distributed on digital platforms like the internet, iTunes downloads, and video on demand. The networks, film studios and media corporations, represented by The Association of Motion Pictures and Television Producers (AMPTP) say that the value of the internet is unknown; that a dollar amount cannot be placed on it. That’s what they said about the nascent home video market during the last strike 20 years ago, and the Writers Guild conceded a bargaining position that would temporarily reduce their royalty to only $.04 on every VHS (and later DVD) sold while AMPTP developed the home video market. The market exploded, but AMPTP never increased the writers’ royalties again, and now is making the same argument regarding the new digital platforms in order to maintain the same low percentage (fool me once...). The Writers Guild is seeking to double the percentage, which would amount to about $.08 per DVD, not an outrageous request. If AMPTP doesn’t see any clear financial potential in the digital realm, how do they come up with the figures for the billion-dollar copyright infringement lawsuits they initiate, like Viacom’s against YouTube?
When you think about it, the writers’ demand for fair compensation in these new markets isn’t so different from our negotiations as independent filmmakers for licensing our films in the digital realm. Recently we licensed our film “State of Fear” to US Television, and the broadcaster asked that we throw in, at no extra charge, video-on-demand (VOD) rights. We insisted that it was only fair that we get a share of each VOD sale and after standing firm against the broadcaster’s argument that the company did not know what the value of this digital platform would be, we were able to negotiate a per download percentage share. So the precedent set if the Writers Guild prevails will affect each and every independent filmmaker in the form a potential new revenue streams, an additional royalty, and an easier time negotiating our rights.
The networks, studios and media corporations have deep pockets. AMPTP has broken off negotiations, and would like to wait out the Guild. It may be a long cold strike, but it will be shorter and it will feel warmer if the independent film community supports the writers. Go to www.wga.org, find out where the next picket line is, and join us. Everyone should share in the proceeds of this brave new digital world.
For all the inside information and news about the strike, go to Nikki Finke’s great blog www.deadlinehollywooddaily.com and read the series “Why We Write” by striking Guild members. Here’s a video we found on YouTube that explains why we fight:
Ex-President of Peru Alberto Fujimori went on trial for human rights crimes,
appropriately enough, on Human Rights Day, December 10. He started out with a dramatic opening speech, waving his arms about and yelling “Soy inocente!” (I’m innocent!). He claims to have safeguarded the human rights of 25 million Peruvians, “without exception”.
As the trial unfolds it brings to the fore one of the great debates of our times, how do democratic societies deal with the threat of terrorism and maintain the rule of law? Fujimori supporters believe the rule of law was expendable in light of the terrorist threat that Peru faced, and the Peruvian Truth & Reconciliation Commission, as we showed in State of Fear, concluded the opposite. It is a historic trial, and has already generated a cellphone ringtone that spread like wildfire throughout Peru, that starts with Fujimori shouting “Soy inocente!” followed by the judge saying “Aquí mando yo” (I’m in charge here) and for good measure ends with King Juan Carlos saying “Por que no te callas” from the time he told Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to shut up - all of this over Fujimori’s campaign song from 2000, El Baile del Chino. Here it is:
After the initial elation of hearing that Peru’s ex-President, Alberto Fujimori, was finally being extradited from Chile to Peru to face human rights and corruption charges,
it was shocking but not surprising to see the old thuggish tactics of Fujimori’s supporters at work again: “El Ojo Que Llora” (The Eye That Cries), a memorial in Lima to the 70,000 people killed in Peru’s war with Shining Path, was defaced with orange paint (the color of Fujimori’s party) by a group of vandals. In recent years the memorial had become a gathering place to further peace and reconciliation, where the annual commemoration of the delivery of Peru’s Truth & Reconciliation Commission Final Report (on August 29, 2003) is held. El Ojo Que Llora, created by artist Lika Mutal, is in the network of the International Coalition of Historic Sites of Conscience, in recognition of its profound significance as a bastion of the collective memory of a nation emerging from mass atrocities. See it in this video:
Of course the Fujimoristas felt threatened by the serene power of this memorial, it’s 70,000 stones laid out in a labyrinth a constant reminder of the reign of terror and corruption that Peru lived during Fujimori’s regime, as exemplified by politician Martha Chavez, one of Fujimori’s staunchest supporters and allies, who declared that “With pleasure, I would have destroyed the memorial myself.”
We sent the following letter to the Editor of The New York Times to critique their coverage of Fujimori’s extradition to Peru and the historical narrative he successfully spun during his time in power and that persists to this day. Although the NY Times didn’t publish it, we shared the letter with Mirko Lauer, one of Peru’s foremost opinion makers, who did publish it in his column:
“To the Editor:
It’s a shame that in his article (Chile Returns Fujimori to Peru to Face Charges - 9/23/07) Simon Romero reinforces the historical narrative promoted by Alberto Fujimori that he was responsible for crushing the Shining Path movement in Peru. This is a distortion of the facts. In fact, as the Peruvian Truth & Reconciliation Commission concluded in its Final Report, the biggest blow to terrorism in Peru was the capture of Shining Path leader Abimael Guzmán, a capture that was executed without firing a shot after a 5-year police investigation that had started before Mr. Fujimori took power, led by Detective Benedicto Jimenez and his small counter-terrorism team, known as the GEIN (Special Intelligence Group). Mr. Fujimori preferred a military approach to terrorism which led to an increase in the Shining Path insurgency with car bombs exploding in Lima almost daily. Mr. Jimenez treated terrorism as a criminal problem that had to be solved through old fashioned detective work, and was disdained and underfunded by Mr. Fujimori. When the capture of Mr. Guzmán occurred on a Saturday night, Mr. Fujimori was on a weekend fishing trip, completely unaware of the operation, and raced back to Lima when he heard the news. Not wanting to be upstaged by Mr. Jimenez, Mr. Fujimori promptly dismissed him.
--
Paco de Onís, Pamela Yates, Peter Kinoy”
As we showed in our film State of Fear, Fujimori was a master manipulator of the media, and nothing makes it clearer than this video clip we edited showing footage shot with a hidden camera set up by Fujimori’s spy chief and master of corruption, Vladimiro Montesinos. We call it “Latin America’s First Media Dictator” - see for yourself:
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 Ríos 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 Army’s 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”.
After observing the reactions of viewers of “State of Fear” at screenings all over the world, Pamela and Peter and I are left with the feeling that the film acts as a kind of Rorschach test, since the most diverse audiences seem to like the film for their own particular reasons, whether it be Nepali pro-democracy activists, Russian human rights defenders, U.S. military personnel, Peruvian victims of political violence, Latin American leftists, U.S. citizens concerned about civil liberties, and so forth...
This feeling was recently reinforced when we won two great prizes from very different worlds, essentially validating our work from very different political perspectives. One was the Habana Film Festival “Prize for Best Film or Video About Latin America by a non-Latin American Director” and the other was the Overseas Press Club award for “Best Reporting in Any Medium on Latin America”. We had a lovely evening at the Mandarin Hotel in the Time Warner Center, to receive the OPC award in the company of our good friends Marlene Braga, Bruni Burres, Paul van Zyl and Alex Wilde, all of them fellow travelers on the long “State of Fear” journey - it was only fitting that we share the acclaim.
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 decided 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 divide 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 middle 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 alongside 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 said about a great many places in this beautiful and troubled world.
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 sound depressing but the way the stories were handled really should inspire you to action. Two films that really stood out were one by Wim Wenders set in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and one by Spanish/Peruvian documentary maker Javier Corcuera (who also made The Back of the World and Winter in Baghdad, two memorable docs) that follows a group of Colombians returning to their land after being forcibly displaced by paramilitary groups. Here is the trailer of Invisibles - don’t miss it if you have chance to see it…
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 narrative fiction realm there were two magnificent films nominated for Academy Awards: Pan’s Labyrinth and The Lives of Others (both won Oscars in different categories). In each case the story takes us deep into a police state when it is firmly entrenched, when the apparatus seems impregnable and resistance might seem futile...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 effective 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.
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 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 I’ve 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.
While we are making our films we always have a primary audience in mind, but in the case of State of Fear we had two. One was the Peruvian people, as we wanted our film to perpetuate the landmark examination of a war on terror revealed in the Final Report of the Peruvian Truth & Reconciliation Commission.
The other was the U.S., because we felt Americans needed to see the tragic consequences of the Peruvian experience with their “war on terror”, full of alarming parallels to the U.S. approach to terrorism after 9/11. What we hadn’t anticipated was how much the findings of Peru’s Truth Commission would resonate with audiences around the world – the use of fear of terrorism by elected leaders to expand their power was brought up in every Q&A at film festivals all over the world – when a student raised this issue after our screening at the Stalker Human Rights Festival in Moscow, Pamela commented that she thought that’s why our film had been invited, and the ensuing cheering and uproar caused the nervous festival director to shut down the Q&A!
In the 2 years since its release, State of Fear has resonated with human rights defenders throughout the world. It’s been translated into 48 languages and broadcast in 157 countries, and has been selected to participate in dozens of international human rights film festivals, including:
• It was the “Opening Night Film” at the 2005 Human Rights Watch International Film Festival in New York and was selected for their US traveling film festival.
• It was chosen as “Best of Fest” at the 2006 Human Rights Watch International Film Festival in London.
• It received the “Audience Award” at the 2005 Amnesty International EXPOSE Film Festival in Los Angeles and was selected to be on the AI traveling film festival.
• It was an Official Selection of the 2005 Stalker Human Rights Film Festival in Moscow.
• It toured major Human Rights festivals of European cities the entire month of March 2006, including London, Amsterdam, The Hague, Paris, Geneva and Bologna.
• It was selected to open the First Brazilian Human Rights Film Festival in 2006, screening in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Brasilia, and Recife.
• It received the 2006 “Henry Hampton Award for Excellence in Film & Video” from the Council on Foundations.
• A special screening of State of Fear was held at the headquarters of the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
• It was selected to screen at the 2006 Human Rights Defenders Forum at the Carter Center in Atlanta, hosted by President Jimmy Carter and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Barbour.
• It was invited by Spanish Judge Baltazar Garzón to participate in Transatlantic Dialogues, a symposium he held at NYU Law School. The symposium will become part of a book.
Examples of how State of Fear has been embraced by human rights activists:
• The Peruvian National Human Rights Coordinator, comprising 63 human rights organizations throughout Peru, is using State of Fear as an educational tool to maintain awareness of the findings of the Peruvian Truth Commission, and is will distribute 1,000 DVDs of the Quechua-language version of State of Fear throughout the Andes, in the areas most affected by the violence.
• After the arrest of ex-President Alberto Fujimori in Chile when he attempted to return to Peru, Peruvian national television station Canal 7 broadcast State of Fear multiple times to remind the general public of the atrocities committed during Fujimori’s authoritarian regime.
• While the Chilean government is considering Peru’s request to extradite Fujimori, Peruvian human rights activists have held screenings on State of Fear in Chile to educate the Chilean public on the findings of the Peruvian Truth Commission regarding Fujimori’s regime.
• After State of Fear screened in Nepal at the Films South Asia festival in 2005, Nepali human rights defenders produced a Nepali-language version of the film and distributed over 200 DVDs to pro-democracy and human rights activists throughout Nepal.
• In Russia human rights organizations have been using the Russian-language version of State of Fear to illustrate the dangers faced by a democracy when leaders use fear of terrorism to consolidate authoritarian power especially as it pertains to Putin’s policy towards Chechnya.
• In Northern Ireland State of Fear is used as an educational tool in ongoing efforts to establish a Truth Commission.
• In Colombia State of Fear is being used by human rights activists to explore conflict resolution methods to bring an end to 50 years of violence in the war-torn country.
Theatrical release and television broadcasts of State of Fear:
• National Geographic Channels International broadcast State of Fear in 154 countries in 45 languages reaching 170 million homes. It was selected to launch the first season of the NGCI series “No Borders”.
• State of Fear had its theatrical premiere in New York City at the Film Forum.
It went on to showcase in 45 American cities. In addition, the film was selected to tour in 8 cities on the 2006 Southern Circuit-Tour of Independent filmmakers.
• The History Channel en Español (US) launched its 2006 fall season with State of Fear.
• Sundance Channel will premiere the English version of State of Fear in Fall 2007.
• More than 300 US universities and colleges have purchased the State of Fear DVD.
During the regime of Alberto Fujimori in Peru (1990-2000) his éminence grise was Vladimiro Montesinos, who wielded power with mountains of cash and the brutal “Grupo Colina” death squad - the apparatus that Fujimori and Montesinos set up is often referred to in Peru as the “Fujimontesinos Mafia”. One of their most insidious strategies was to buy the cooperation of nearly all of Peru’s media moguls, thereby exercising practically complete control of the news. Fortunately for posterity, Montesinos secretly videotaped his bribery sessions as insurance in case anyone changed their mind. We’ve used that footage to create a short film about what Peruvian Truth Commissioner Carlos Iván Degregori has called “Latin America’s First Media Dictatorship” - see for yourself…
Rich and Poor: Inequality in America—4 hours of Special programming on Link TV!
Link TV will broadcast a four-hour special, RICH & POOR: INEQUALITY IN AMERICA, on Friday, Oct. 6, Wednesday, Oct. 11 and Saturday, Oct. 28 beginning at 5 p.m. PST and 8 p.m. EST.
The special will feature Peter Kinoy & Pamela Yates’ award-winning film, Poverty Outlaw, selections from Robert Greenwald’s Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, and Inequality Matters: A Speech by Bill Moyers, addressing the class war in America in which the “rich are getting richer and the poor don’t have a chance.” It will also feature a sit down with author, Thom Hartmann, (Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class) and political satirist, Will Durst, host of Link TV’s “The Outsourcing Report.”
We are pleased to tell you that the new History Channel en Español will launch its North American broadcasts with the Spanish-language version of STATE OF FEAR today, Monday, September 18th, at 8PM. Since Hispanics are the largest and fastest growing minority in the United States, and since many have come here or been born here as a result of internal conflicts in their own countries similar to the Peruvian experience portrayed in STATE OF FEAR, we are especially proud to have this opportunity to reach the Spanish speaking public with a reflection of their own reality.
Pamela, Paco & Peter
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Estimados Amigos(as) y Colegas,
Nos complace anunciar que el nuevo canal History Channel en Español inaugurará sus transmisiones en norteamérica con la versión en español de STATE OF FEAR hoy lunes, 18 de septiembre, a las 8PM. Considerando que los hispanos son la mayor y más creciente minoría en los Estados Unidos, y que muchos de ellos han llegado acá o han nacido acá debido a conflictos internos en sus países de origen similares a la experiencia peruana ilustrada en STATE OF FEAR, nos sentimos particularmente orgullosos de tener esta oportunidad de llegar al público hispanohablante con este reflejo de su propia realidad.
