GRANITO: CJA’s Guatemala Genocide Case at Sundance Film Festival


On January 25th, 2011, Pamela Yates’s documentary Granito premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.

Granito trailer from Skylight Pictures on Vimeo.

In 1982, documentary filmmaker Yates’s  When the Mountains Tremble introduced the world to the Guatemalan government’s genocide of the Mayan people and propelled Mayan activist Rigoberta Menchú to the international stage.  Yates shot the only known footage of the army as it carried out the genocide.

Twenty-five years later, this footage is evidence in CJA’s international human rights case against the former political and military leadership.  Yates reunites with Menchú–now a Nobel laureate–as well as CJA attorney Almudena Bernabeu, Kate Doyle of the National Security Archives, and Professor Naomi Roht-Arriaza, the architects of the Guatemala Genocide Case.

CJA is lead counsel in the Guatemala Genocide Case before the Spanish National Court (SNC).  The Rigoberta Menchú Tum Foundation and others filed the original complaint in 1999, charging former head of state General Efraín Ríos Montt and other senior Guatemalan officials with terrorism, genocide, and systematic torture.  Learn more about the case here.

Pam Yates, Almudena Bernabeu, Robert Redford and CJA’s donor Celia Tejada at Sundance screening of Granito.

Click here to learn more about CJA’s involvement in the film.

Visit the Granito website here.

To learn how you can support the case against the perpetrators of this genocide and get more information on screenings of GRANITO, contact CJA at:

center4justice@cja.org
415. 544. 0444