SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL: At a Sundance panel last week, Pamela Yates suggested that her new film, Granito, was not just a sequel to her 1982 film, When the Mountains Tremble, but a meta-exploration of the form and its potential. Where the earlier film documented the guerrilla movement in Guatemala—an uprising that sought to join the revolutions sweeping through Central America during that time—Granito revisits all of the things Yates didn’t see, and the impact that her time there as a witness and a filmmaker has had on the Mayan people’s ongoing quest for justice.
'I had no idea I was filming in the middle of a genocide," Yates says, as footage from When the Mountains Tremble flickers on screen. It’s the first of a number of reflections in what is framed as a first person story. The grainy images of shallow graves being dug into dry earth would seem to belie her claim, but Yates suggests her youth and naïve enthusiasm for the cause (and her film) blinded her to the full extent of the truth. The crucial first chunk of Granito (which is split into three parts: A Chronicle Foretold; Genocide on Trial; and Grains of Sand) assumes a familiarity with both Yates’s work and the conflict that many viewers won’t have. Some of the loving shots of film unspooling and Yates watching her young self improvise a clapper board might have been better spent on context for a conflict that’s introduced in generic terms.
Well into the film we learn that the genocide she’s referring to involved a plan by Guatemala’s military dictatorship to exterminate the ethnic Mayans who inhabited the country’s highlands and were rebelling against racism and grabs for power and land. Ultimately, two hundred thousand Mayans were killed, and their insurgency was brutally squashed. Twenty-five years later, the Mayan people were still waiting for justice.
Granito gains narrative and thematic traction during its middle, procedural section, when Yates’s original footage becomes part of the prosecution’s case in an international genocide trial. Ironically the hearing to determine whether a trial will take place occurs in Spain; Guatemala’s vertically integrated corruption makes justice impossible, and in fact ultimately blocks their target—a General named Efraín Ríos Montt—from being extradited. When 200,000 people have been slaughtered the quest for courtroom justice seems at best to be a symbolic one, and yet the will to achieve it is indomitable. Yates focuses on several of the people who appeared in her first documentary—notably Nobel Peace Prize recipient Rigoberta Menchú—and even managed to find the guerrilla fighter who shot down the helicopter she was in with a military honcho. The testimony given before an impassive Spanish judge is wrenching, and yet, as one of the several activists and human rights prosecutors Yates assembles points out, witness testimony is not enough.
What about bones in the ground? And an enormous cache of classified police documents? The work of a forensic archivist and a man who left Guatemala as a child and has returned to excavate mass graves hidden in plain sight suggests the consuming dedication required—over decades—to make incremental progress. The horror of the event itself is compounded by the silence and denial surrounding it, and the perversely difficult task of legally proving something that is so clearly, evidently, and painfully true. This is the most potent form of repression: Denying a people not just their lives and their land but their history.
Despite its tri-part structure and dedicated perspective, Granito—whose title invokes a proverb about the futility of a single grain of sand and the power of many—is hobbled by its occasional indulgence in sentimental self-congratulation and a lack of narrative coherence. The two are probably connected: Though hardly unreliable, as a narrator Yates seems not just ruminative but easily distracted. Certainly there are moments of great emotional power, geo-political import and fascinating self-relexivity, but I found myself wishing they had been supported more firmly by that less noble and yet more elusive achievement: A tightly woven story.
