Pamela Yates is an American documentary filmmaker and human rights activist. She has directed films about war crimes, racism, and genocide in the United States and Latin America, often with emphasis on the legal responses.
Pamela Yates is an American documentary filmmaker and human rights activist. She has directed films about war crimes, racism, and genocide in the United States and Latin America, often with emphasis on the legal responses.
Pamela Yates was born and raised in the Appalachian coal-mining region of Pennsylvania but left at a young age to live in New York City. She earned a Bachelor's degree from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1976. [1]
She is a Guggenheim Fellow, the Director of the Sundance Award winning When the Mountains Tremble, the Producer of the Emmy Award- winning Loss of Innocence, and the Executive Producer of the Academy Award winning "Witness to War." She most recently directed the film Granito: How to Nail a Dictator, which served as key evidence in the Ríos Montt genocide trial in Guatemala. Previously Yates directed, The Reckoning: The Battle for the International Criminal Court," a feature-length film and educational initiative and State of Fear, a feature-length documentary that tells the epic story of Peru's 20-year war on terror based on the findings of the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Pamela is a co-founder and partner of Skylight Pictures, a company committed to producing artistic, challenging and socially relevant independent media and media strategies on issues of human rights and the quest for justice.
Her 2006 film, State of Fear: The Truth about Terrorism , about the findings of Truth and Reconciliation Commission concerning the internal conflict in Peru, was translated into 44 languages and broadcast in 157 countries.
The Reckoning: The Battle for the International Criminal Court, released in 2009, is about the work of the International Criminal Court. In 2010, Yates was nominated for two Emmys for it – Best Documentary Film and Outstanding Investigative Journalism in a Long Form Documentary. The Reckoning was nominated for a Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival.
Her 2011 film, Granito: How to Nail a Dictator, is a sequel to When the Mountains Tremble . In it, Yates uses her archives to provide evidence for a war crimes tribunal set in Spain (using the concept of universal jurisdiction) in its efforts to prosecute the genocide in Guatemala. [2] [3] The film was an official selection included in the Premiere Documentary Section of the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, and was also nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Investigative Journalism in a Long Form Documentary. Yates received a Guggenheim Fellowship for her work on the film, which served as key evidence in the Ríos Montt genocide trial in Guatemala. On May 3, 2015, the film won the White Camel award at the FiSahara. [4] [5]
Four of Yates' films — When the Mountains Tremble , Poverty Outlaw , Takeover , and Teatro! — were nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, and When The Mountains Tremble won the award in 1984.
Her film, State of Fear: The Truth about Terrorism , won the 2006 Overseas Press Club Award for "Best Reporting in Any Medium on Latin America". [6]
Awards and nominations for her 2011 Documentary, Granito: How to Nail A Dictator include: Official Selection, Sundance Film Festival, 2011; Emmy Nomination, Outstanding Investigative Journalism: Long Form, 2013; Opening Night Film, Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, 2011; Grand Prix for Best Creative Documentary,Paris International Human Rights Film Festival; Peace & Reconciliation Prize, The Geneva International Human Rights Festival, 2011 Jury Grand Prize, The Politics on Film Festival, 2011; Honorable Mention, Overseas Press Club Award; 2012 Founder's Award, Traverse City Film Festival, 2011
José Efraín Ríos Montt was a Guatemalan military officer, politician, and dictator who served as de facto President of Guatemala from 1982 to 1983. His brief tenure as chief executive was one of the bloodiest periods in the long-running Guatemalan Civil War. Ríos Montt's counter-insurgency strategies significantly weakened the Marxist guerrillas organized under the umbrella of the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG) while also leading to accusations of war crimes and genocide perpetrated by the Guatemalan Army under his leadership.
In 1994 Guatemala's Commission for Historical Clarification - La Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico (CEH) - was created as a response to the thousands of atrocities and human rights violations committed during the decades long civil war that began in 1962 and ended in the late 1990s with United Nations-facilitated peace accords. The commission operated under a two-year mandate, from 1997 to 1999, and employed three commissioners: one Guatemalan man, one male non-national, and one Mayan woman. The mandate of the commission was not to judge but to clarify the past with "objectivity, equity and impartiality."
Participant Media, LLC is an American independent film and television production company founded in 2004 by Jeffrey Skoll, dedicated to entertainment intended to spur social change. The company finances and co-produces film and television content, as well as digital entertainment through its subsidiary SoulPancake, which the company acquired in 2016.
State of Fear: The Truth about Terrorism (2005) is a documentary film produced by Skylight Pictures and directed by Pamela Yates. It won the 2006 Overseas Press Club Award for "Best Reporting in Any Medium on Latin America". It has been translated into 48 languages and broadcast in 157 countries.
Founded by Pamela Yates, Peter Kinoy and Paco de Onís in 1981, Skylight is a media organization based in Brooklyn, NY that has been making feature-length documentaries and short digital projects for over 30 years. Skylight is a member of New Day Films.
Peter Kinoy is an American documentary filmmaker and film editor. Four of his films were nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, and When the Mountains Tremble won the award in 1984. State of Fear: The Truth about Terrorism, which he co-wrote and edited, won the 2006 Overseas Press Club Award for "Best Reporting in Any Medium on Latin America". He co-wrote the 1986 documentary Witness to Apartheid, which was nominated for an Academy Award, with Sharon I. Sopher, the film's producer and director.
The Reckoning: The Battle for the International Criminal Court is a 2009 documentary film about the International Criminal Court produced by Skylight Pictures and directed by Pamela Yates. It was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival and won Best Documentary at the Politics on Film Festival.
When The Mountains Tremble is a 1983 documentary film produced by Skylight Pictures about the war between the Guatemalan Military and the Mayan Indigenous population of Guatemala.
The Guatemalan genocide, also referred to as the Maya genocide, or the Silent Holocaust, was the massacre of Maya civilians during the Guatemalan Civil War (1960–1996) by successive US-backed Guatemalan military governments. Massacres, forced disappearances, torture and summary executions of guerrillas and especially civilians at the hands of security forces had been widespread since 1965, and was a longstanding policy of the military regime, which US officials were aware of. A report from 1984 discussed "the murder of thousands by a military government that maintains its authority by terror". Human Rights Watch has described "extraordinarily cruel" actions by the armed forces, mostly against unarmed civilians.
Enemies of the People is a 2009 British-Cambodian documentary film written and directed by Rob Lemkin and Thet Sambath. The film depicts the 10-year quest of co-director Sambath to find truth and closure in the Killing Fields of Cambodia. The film features interviews of former Khmer Rouge officials from the most senior surviving leader to the men and women who slit throats during the regime of Democratic Kampuchea between 1975 and 1979.
Femke Wolting is a Dutch independent new media producer.
Lisa F. Jackson is an American documentary filmmaker, known most recently for her films, The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo (2007) and Sex Crimes Unit (2011), which aired on HBO in 2008 and 2011. Her work has earned awards including two Emmy awards and a Jury Prize from the Sundance Film Festival. She has screened her work and lectured at the Columbia University School of Journalism, Brandeis, Purdue, NYU, Yale, Notre Dame and Harvard University and was a visiting professor of documentary film at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan.
Lilly Hartley is an American documentary film producer and actress, and the founder of Candescent Films.
Iris Yassmin Barrios Aguilar is a judge and the president of one of Guatemala’s two High Risk Court Tribunals. She was the presiding judge in the case of Efraín Ríos Montt, a former dictator of Guatemala. In that trial Montt was found guilty of the genocide of indigenous Ixil Mayans; the verdict came in 2013. The trial was the first time a national judiciary tried a former head of state for genocide in his home country. However, on May 20, 2013, the Constitutional Court of Guatemala overturned the conviction, voiding all proceedings back to April 19 and ordering that the trial be "reset" to that point, pending a dispute over the recusal of judges. Officials have said that Ríos Montt's trial will resume in January 2015.
Cynthia Hill is an American director and producer. She is most famous for creating, directing, and producing the television show A Chef's Life (2013–2018), as well as the documentary films Private Violence (2014), “The Guestworker” (2006), and “Tobacco Money Feeds My Family” (2003).
Almudena Bernabeu is an international attorney, writer and co-founder and director of Guernica37 International Justice Chambers, Almudena Bernabeu was the director of the Transitional Justice Program at the Center for Justice and Accountability (CJA) until 2017. She is the winner of the 2015 Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Award.
Emily Kassie is a filmmaker, investigative journalist, and cinematographer. Her debut feature documentary Sugarcane (film) premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2024 where it won the Grand Jury Directing Award.
500 Years: Life in Resistance is a 2017 American documentary film directed by Pamela Yates about the trial of Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt for genocide against the country's indigenous Maya population in the 1980s and the popular uprising that followed the trial, which led to the toppling of President Otto Perez Molina.
Human rights is an issue in Guatemala. The establishment of the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala has helped the Attorney General prosecute extrajudicial killings and corruption. There remains widespread impunity for abusers from the Guatemalan Civil War, which ran from 1960 to 1996, and Human Rights Watch considers threats and violence against unionists, journalists and lawyers a major concern.
Bonni Cohen is an American documentary film producer and director. She is the co-founder of Actual Films and has produced and directed an array of award-winning films. Most recently, she produced the Oscar-nominated film Lead Me Home, which premiered at the 2021 Telluride Film Festival and is a Netflix Original. She also recently co-directed Athlete A, which won an Emmy for Outstanding Investigative Documentary and received four nominations from the Critics’ Choice Awards. She is the co-founder of Actual Films, the production company of the documentaries An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, Audrie & Daisy, 3.5 Minutes, The Island President, Lost Boys of Sudan and The Rape of Europa. Cohen is the co-founder of the Catapult Film Fund.
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