Film Screening:

Granito: How to Nail a Dictator
(Pamela Yates, 2011, 103 min, USA/Guatemala, in Spanish and English with English subtitles, Color, Blu-Ray)

-- Q&A to follow with director Pamela Yates and producer Paco de Onís!

Granito is a story of destinies joined by Guatemala's past, and how a documentary film intertwined with a nation's turbulent history emerges as an active player in the present. In Granito our characters sift for clues buried in archives of mind and place and historical memory, seeking to uncover a narrative that could unlock the past and settle matters of life and death in the present. Each of the five main characters whose destinies collide in Granito are connected by the Guatemala of 1982, then engulfed in a war where a genocidal scorched earth campaign by the military exterminated nearly 200,000 Maya people.

Now, as if a watchful Maya god were weaving back together threads of a story unraveled by the passage of time, forgotten by most, our characters become integral to the overarching narrative of wrongs done and justice sought that they have pieced together, each adding their granito, their tiny grain of sand, to the epic tale.

Cost: Free and Open to the Public

Sponsors: The Duke Human Rights Center at the Franklin Humanities Institute (DHRC@FHI), the Archives for Human Rights & Documentary Arts in the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, and the Program in Arts of the Moving Image (AMI)