Latest Reviews

Video Librarian - February, 01 2008

January/February 2008 (Volume 23, Issue 1)

Living Broke in Boom Times ***
(2007) 74 min. DVD: $150: public libraries & high schools; $295: colleges & universities. Skylight Pictures (dist. by New Day Films). PPR. ISBN: 1-57448-199-1.
Living Broke in Boom Times condenses three documentaries by filmmakers Pamela Yates and Peter Kinoy concerning the plight of America’s homeless and efforts to affect government policy—presented with new retrospective wraparound commentary from key activists. “Takeover” (1991) chronicles events surrounding the first national housing takeover, in which homeless people in eight cities organized to simultaneously settle in empty HUD houses. “Poverty Outlaw” (1997) focuses on a dispossessed single mother forced to make choices that society deems illegal (such as living in empty houses or stealing thrown-away food), while also becoming involved in activist work related to the problems faced by the poor in the wake of welfare reform. And “Outriders” (1999) documents the 1998 New Freedom Bus Tour, following a group of 50 poor Pennsylvanians (including babies and teens) on a month-long cross-country trip—collecting the stories of similar folk who lost their jobs during a period of supposed economic expansion, or were ejected from the welfare rolls—and ultimately arriving at the United Nations, where the group alleges that U.S. policies regarding the poor represent a violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Taken together, the three films offer a powerful and impassioned look at a segment of American society too often ignored. Divided into chapters (which make this especially suitable for classroom use), DVD extras include a featurette by Yates and Kinoy on their work, an artfully arranged slideshow, and a brief 1990 poetry performance by Will Sales entitled “Death of a Neighborhood.” Recommended. Aud: H, C, P. (F. Swietek)

Video Librarian

Howard Zinn - February, 11 2008

It is a wonderful documentary, heart-rending in its depiction of homelessness and desperation, yet inspiring in what it shows about the magnificence of people fighting back, organizing, refusing to accept their situation, trying to build a national movement. I found the close-ups of these people, their voices, their down-home eloquence very moving. I do hope this will be widely seen. I think it can play an important role in arousing people to action.

New York Times - January, 11 2006

Moving from the breathtaking beauty of the Peruvian Andes to the graceful sweep of coastal Lima, Pamela Yates’s harrowing documentary “State of Fear” chronicles 20 years of terror, brutality and repression.

Based on the testimony of more than 16,000 people to the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the film begins with the rise of the Maoist leader Abimael Guzma?n and his Shining Path guerrillas and culminates in the collapse of President Alberto K. Fujimori’s government in November 2000, when Mr. Fujimori resigned during a corruption scandal. Between those events lie an estimated 70,000 dead and untold numbers scarred for life.

Simply constructed around moving personal interviews, “State of Fear” clearly illuminates the racism that shielded affluent Lima residents from the atrocities suffered by the rest of the country. Not until “high-class white people” were killed, says one person who is interviewed, did Shining Path become real. But for the indigenous population, forced to choose between joining the guerrillas or being tortured by the military, terror was an everyday occurrence. As archival film shows a dead child held aloft like a broken doll, and an ex-guerrilla calmly explains how, at age 11, killing “became an addiction,” the possible consequences of the United States’ campaign against terror become an uncomfortable subtext. This discomfort is only reinforced by “The Montesinos Media Buy,” seven minutes of surveillance video shot by Mr. Fujimori’s disgraced chief of intelligence, Vladimoro Montesinos. A damning record of the media bribery that oiled Mr. Fujimori’s counterterrorist campaign, the film is a shockingly funny accompaniment to “State of Fear” and a lesson on the hazards of choosing security over democracy.

State of Fear
Opens today in Manhattan.
Directed by Pamela Yates; narrated in English and Spanish, with English subtitles, by Karen Duffy;
director of photography, Juan Dura?n; edited by Peter Kinoy; music by Tito la Rosa and Tavo Castillo;
produced by Paco de Oni?s; released by Skylight Pictures. Playing with a seven-minute short by Mr.
Kinoy, “The Montesinos Media Buy,” at the Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, west of Avenue of
the Americas, South Village. Running time: 94 minutes. This film is not rated.

The Onion - January, 11 2006

Though it never explicitly mentions the elephant in the room, Pamela Yates’ documentary State Of Fear, about Peru’s bloody 20-year war against the Maoist terrorist organization Shining Path, is really intended as a cautionary tale for the current War On Terror. Some of the parallels are more relevant than others, but its central point is a powerful one: That eroding of democratic principles for the purpose of protecting them is not only ineffective in fighting terrorism, but leads to corruption and abuse of power at the executive level. Imposing media control and the heavy-handed use of the military, President Alberto Fujimori produced a climate of fear that was effective in controlling his people, but not necessarily effective in fighting the enemy.

Whatever its propagandistic purpose, State Of Fear draws out these contemporary resonances through a straightforward, four-square documentary style, patiently revealing its history lesson via the expected talking heads, archival footage, and photographs. Inspired by the Truth Commission, the independent council that sorted through testimony and evidence after the fact, Yates and her crew collect an oral history of their own: They interview a range of witnesses, from former Shining Path fanatics and military officials to the peasants who were oppressed and abused by both sides. Between 1980 and 2000, roughly 700,000 people were killed during the uprising, which started in the mountains and countryside as a Maoist revolution and gradually seeped into cosmopolitan Lima. Founded by Abimael Guzma?n, whose power over his followers made him a figure of quasi-religious devotion, Shining Path flourished in an area where Peru’s ostensibly democratic principles didn’t reach. After Fujimori was brought to office in landslide election, he used his mandate to dissolve Congress and step up an aggressive security campaign that wreaked more havoc than it contained.

State Of Fear builds to a key point about the consequences of democracies fighting terrorism by erasing its central tenets, but in doing so, it doesn’t underplay the horrors wrought by Guzma?n’s organization. Yates interviews a child soldier abducted into Shining Path’s cause, a peasant woman who watched the revolutionaries burn her grandmother alive, and an imprisoned true believer who appears brainwashed to this day. Yet the film hits hardest when examining the Fujimori dictatorship, which continued to tighten its grip on the country even after Guzman’s capture in 1992, using any terrorist activity as justification for its own atrocities. Fujimori exploited his extra latitude to bypass the rule of law, punish his political enemies, and bully a nation into choosing security over freedom. Remind you of anyone? 

Time Out NY - January, 12 2006

Terrorist attacks, military incursions, car bombs, assassinations, propaganda: Peru’s sordid 20-year cycle of violence and corruption provides a disquieting mirror of the current conflicts in the Middle East. This edifying new documentary makes the parallel explicit with an opening voiceover that solemnly proclaims: “Our story takes place in Peru, but in the age of terror, it could take place anywhere.”

Nearly 70,000 Peruvians died between 1980 and 2000 as a result of the nation’s civil strife, says a member of the Peruvian Truth Commission, which was a guiding force for director Pamela Yates as she traveled to the Andean mountains and Lima to examine the country’s brutal history. The film offers a balanced view of the atrocities: On one side, Shining Path revolutionary leader Abimael Guzman began a reign of terror in rural areas, torturing and murdering villagers and kidnapping children for his Maoist army. On the other, Peruvian armed forces took to the countryside, killing indiscriminately, unable to differentiate between Shining Path members and civilians. Caught in the crossfire, “We felt as if trapped in a cage,” an indigenous woman says. The film continues through the late 1990s and 2000s, when President Alberto Fujimori embarked on his own bloody counter terrorism campaign. Using unsettling testimonials from truth-and-reconciliation leaders and those who bore witness to civilian deaths committed by guerillas and the government, State of Fear presents a troubling chronicle of the “war on terror” and the all-too-familiar ways that countries bungle it. (Now playing; Film Forum.)
—Anthony Kaufman

New York Daily News - January, 14 2006

State of Fear
At Film Forum (1:34). Not rated: Adult themes, disturbing images. In English and Spanish with subtitles. Pamela Yates’ unblinking chronicle of recent Peruvian history paints a devastating picture of a people nearly destroyed by their own leaders.

Basing her research on the findings of the nation’s recent Truth Commission, Yates details decades of blatant corruption, extreme human-rights abuses and rampant terrorism.

Though the central villain is Abimael Guzma?n, the founder of the Maoist guerrilla cult Shining Path, there are few heroes to be found here. Even the democratically elected president who pledged to destroy Guzman, Alberto Fujimori, wasted little time in instituting a near-dictatorial reign.

The country’s ongoing problems, one observer contends, are the result of “a careful cultivation of ignorance and forgetfulness.” If that’s so, this powerful work ought to be screened yearly at every school in Peru.

Village Voice - January, 10 2006

Moody muckraking: State of Fear
State of Fear: The Truth About Terrorism
Directed by Pamela Yates
Skylight
January 11 through 17, Film Forum

An informative if shrill primer on the last 35 years of Peruvian plight, the new doc State of Fear may only be effective as an educational tool for Americans, whose media have told them next to nothing about one of the Western Hemisphere’s most horrifying killing fields. Next to nothing, that is, except about the destitute nation’s free-market privatization “miracle"—the only barrier to which has been “Marxist guerrillas"—as discussed in the occasional New York Times/Washington Post story, regardless of the 80-plus percent unemployment and the 50,000-plus civilians killed during the Belaunde and Fujimori presidencies. We’re back in Noam Chomsky World, where the only data about a country that could possibly be of relevance to Americans are the investment opportunities that its resources and restructured economy provide.

Pamela Yates’s video doc is all about the real stuff, tracing Peru’s arduous path as a microcosm of Cold War embattlement—to paraphrase the old African saying about fighting elephants and the grass they trample, when Communist insurgencies and U.S.-backed governments fight, the real victims are the people in between. Without stooping to mention the name Lori Berenson, Yates outlines the rise of the Shining Path quasi-Maoist movement (itself responsible for over 10,000 murders), the struggle to lock down the entire highlands in order to combat it, and the rise of self-fashioned despot Alberto Fujimori, who, after Shining Path had been neutered by police work, persisted with a monster power grab that included media buyouts, death squads, and the dissolution of congress. (Accompanying Yates’s thorough record is a seven-minute short composed entirely of the leaked bribery videos—complete with coffee tables stacked with cash—that extinguished Fujimori’s career.) With unofficial ownership of the media, Fujimori maintained his grip through three elections, generating a phobic public response to a threat that was no longer there.

State of Fear does its own moody muckraking with portentous music and CARE-ad visuals, but thanks to Peru’s 2002 truth commission, Yates has tons of declassified video footage, of both Shining Path guerrillas and Fujimori troopers in the process of kidnapping, assaulting, and killing civilians. The pertinent lesson here is how the Peruvian power base, as in Iraq, Chechnya, Turkey, west China, and the Palestinian territories after 9-11, exploited the fact of terror to kick up repression and control by force. In a radical programming call-and-answer, see

New York Times - September, 05 2002

Imagine a rural area where there is no electricity, no running water and no real schools for the children. Where local strongmen and a corrupt government plunder natural resources and conspire to keep the peasantry suppressed. That’s not a description of some faraway continent. It’s how certain parts of Mexico are portrayed in “Cause for Murder,” a compelling documentary to be broadcast tonight as the latest program in the PBS series “Wide Angle.”

The documentary’s director and producer is Pamela Yates, who has won international acclaim for her work on Latin American and criminal justice issues. In this film she collaborated with The New York Times and its Mexico City bureau chief, Ginger Thompson. What resulted is a tight, 45-minute story about two young women who were killed for standing up against corruption in Mexico. But it is more than a tale of these two women; it is an examination of how difficult it is to bring change to a political and economic culture that has been in place for decades.

Digna Ochoa and María de los Ángeles Tamés, known as Marigeli, were lawyers with seemingly little in common. Ms. Ochoa grew up poor in the town of Misantla, near the Gulf of Mexico, one of 13 children of a sugar refinery worker. She learned about social injustice at an early age, when her father was falsely accused of murder. Ms. Tamés was born into a middle-class family in the Mexico City suburb of Atizapán and destined for an international life that few Mexicans can aspire to. Both eventually became lawyers and fought the system around them.

That system had been cemented in place by 71 years of rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or the PRI. A combination of corruption, patronage and backing by the armed forces allowed it to rule the country in a manner that did little to improve the lives of the poor. The resentment that built up came to the fore in the 1990’s as the opposition National Action Party, or PAN, found its political voice. In 2000, its candidate, Vicente Fox, was elected president, riding a wave called “el Cambio” ("the Change").

But change at the top does not trickle down easily. In the 1990’s Ms. Ochoa, was trying to bring attention to the plight of the peasants by taking on human rights cases and by raising money for charitable projects in the countryside. In the meantime, Ms. Tamés was getting involved in politics and became a city councilwoman as a member of the PAN. Disappointed by what she saw as the corruption in her own party locally, she dug into kickbacks and other improprieties that led all the way to the town’s mayor.

The film cuts back and forth effectively between the lives of Ms. Ochoa and Ms. Tamés (though I would have liked to see what sort of relationship, if any, the two women had). Their parallel lives are striking, as is the sense of doom that both had because of death threats and the status quo they opposed. Ms. Tamés told her mother that if she didn’t come home one day, she should search for her in the river. On the evening of Sept. 5, 2001, she did return home, but was gunned down at her front gate. A little more than a month later, on Oct. 19, Ms. Ochoa was found shot dead in her office.

The film consists of interviews with family members, friends and officials, interspersed with scenes of the women at work and of Mexican life. President Fox makes multiple appearances and answers questions about politics and government accountability.

The investigation into the murders is the focus of the last third of the film. The bungling (or worse) by the prosecutor in the Ochoa case – who suggests she might have killed herself to achieve political martyrdom – shows that even in death, Ms. Ochoa wasn’t going to get justice immediately.

When asked about corruption, Mr. Fox says: “Things have changed completely in Mexico. Today we have an honest government, an accountable government, that is committed to changing things in Mexico. And our commitment is total in the case of the human rights.” But his antagonistic responses to questions about the Tamés murder and its possible connection to his own party leaves the viewer unsure of the true situation.

At the end of the film, the host of “Wide Angle,” Daljit Dhaliwal, interviews Enrique Krauze, a leading Mexican writer and historian.

One of the film’s best questions is asked by one of its last images – graffiti on a wall. “Éste es el cambio?” it asks. “This is the change?”

San Francisco Chronicle - March, 01 2002

PRESUMED GUILTY: Documentary. 9 tonight, KQED (Channel 9). Television movies, not to mention recurring cop and lawyer series, only dream of having the goods that “Presumed Guilty” has bursting out of its seams.

As part of KQED’s “Bay Window” series, “Presumed Guilty” gets its first television airing tonight and then will air nationally on the PBS system in the fall. For Bay Area viewers, there’s plenty of headline-grabbing history wrapped inside.

Shot over the course of three years, “Presumed Guilty” looks at the inner workings of the San Francisco public defender’s office and its struggle to represent the 90 percent of the population that can’t afford a personal lawyer.

The public defender’s office has 80 attorneys handling roughly 19,000 cases a year. At the time of the filming, Jeff Adachi was second in command, the chief attorney in the office. Adachi is described by a fellow attorney this way: “If this was some sort of tribe, he’d be the high priest.”

San Franciscans know by now one of the kickers in this documentary—that despite years of dedication to the job and the respect of his fellow public defenders, when Adachi’s boss quits, Mayor Willie Brown swears in politically connected family friend Kimiko Burton, who promptly informs Adachi that he’s no longer needed.

For filmmakers Pamela Yates and Peter Kinoy, the news is just another eye- opening revelation in a documentary that is already touching on two famous trials—the murder-for-hire case known as the “Pink Tarantula Murder” and the “Tenderloin Confidential” trial, where a powerful gangster was gunned down by a teenager.

Yates and Kinoy get to the essence of a public defender’s life, what motivates them to take a job where you normally lose far more often than win, by focusing on Will Maas, who’s representing the defendant in the murder-for- hire of a San Francisco hairdresser, and Adachi, who’s representing the defendant, now an adult, in the Tenderloin gangland killing.

Mixed in, we get seasoned advice and perspective from public defender Stephen Rosen, someone who understands the complexities of fighting the good fight (especially when not everyone sees it that way). The filmmakers also follow two rookie defenders, Phoenix Streets and Michele Forrar.

Forget “The Practice” or “Philly” or any of the other courtroom dramas. “Presumed Guilty” is the real deal, and the richness the filmmakers extract from the public defenders’ real lives is riveting television. (This documentary recently ran at the Roxie as well.)

It doesn’t hurt “Presumed Guilty” that there’s a rogues’ gallery of witnesses, sartorially challenged investigators, salacious trial details and real lives at risk. “Presumed Guilty” gets to the gray area of public defense - - that sometimes these people really are guilty, that sometimes defending them takes a toll on your soul and that not everyone who’s guilty is a monster at heart.

That’s always the tough trick—avoiding the neat black-and-white morality of a TV show and trying to understand the complexities of crime in this country.

If viewers don’t know or don’t remember the outcome of those two celebrated cases, it only heightens the built-in drama of the documentary. But even if they do, Yates and Kinoy get their cameras into the courtroom and into the jail cells and frame each case with humanity, making each trial more compelling than it might have appeared to be in the paper or on the news.

It’s pure luck, in a sense, that the likable Adachi—who joins his fellow attorneys in opening up his emotions for the documentary—gets the shocking news of his dismissal on camera.

San Francisco politics rears its ugly head in the public defender’s office just when the filmmakers have shown the grueling, emotional roller-coaster lifestyle they lead, and Brown and Burton look like the interlopers they were.

The film ends as Adachi is running for public defender against the woman who fired him, and you can’t help getting a sweet rise knowing he defies the odds as justice prevails at the polls.

But the real meat of “Presumed Guilty” is not so much about the trials that are happening during this three-year filming period. It’s about Maas’ raw, out- there passion or Rosen’s wily insights into the profession or Streets’ (who’s got the style and aplomb to star in his own show) fulfilling his calling in life.

There’s not a lot of glamour being a public defender. The people who do it are passionate about justice and making sure the system doesn’t unfairly put away someone innocent. The attorneys here acknowledge that a lot of the dregs come through, looking to get off, but they remain focused on the big picture --

that even if you’re presumed guilty, that doesn’t mean you are.

The Recorder - February, 27 2002

The Tales They Tell by Terry Diggs

Possibly the worst aspect of our long and nasty Public Defender’s race has been that the political sparring has never adequately communicated what public defenders do-—or ought to do. That’s unfortunate because public defense is ultimately the antithesis of politics. It is rather--as Peter Kinoy and Pamela Yates demonstrate in their new San Francisco-shot documentary, Presumed Guilty-- the articulation of the very stories the powerful want least to hear.

Certainly, pop culture has given us an overview of public defender life. There’s the occasional feature film (Suspect), the odd series (100 Centre Street), or the case-specific episode of Nightline. But mass media invariably gives us the job’s accouterments—-shoddy office furniture and brimming file cabinets—-not its alchemy. And the nature of public defense is alchemy: the transmutation of grim biographies into our wisest parables; the transfiguration of other’s lives into the narratives through which we come to understand ourselves.

“If this were some kind of tribe, he’d be a high priest,” a young lawyer says of then-PD Jeff Adachi, whose preparation of a homicide case—the conversion of a street shooting into a saga of human displacement--connects Guilty’s multiple plotlines. But the power to recast horror in such a way that it is recognizable as human tragedy isn’t inherited, it’s earned—-the hard-won accretion, the filmmakers suggest, of a special kind of experience. Guilty makes the gradual building of that skill its subject matter, focusing on four defenders--Adachi, Will Maas, Phoenix Streets and Michele Forrar—-each demanding to tell a story that we would otherwise ignore.

And there’s a reason we’re reticent. Guilty juxtaposes wide-angled shots of the people who roam Seventh Street by night against fixed scenes featuring the elegant commentary of defender Steve Rosen, an observer who articulates the larger social principles that justify vigorous public defense. The gap between reality and Rosen’s ideals is apparent. It’s also deadly, sending would-be defenders—-who revere the constitution, but can never quite see the human potential in their constituents--into new jobs after only a few years.

The bridge between back-alley con men and the constitution has always been the defender, excavating and articulating the backstory: “We take this person and we show him to the jury, and we try to bring out the best in him,” Adachi says. And the best in ourselves, as well. The film’s rookies, Streets and Forrar, overcome culture shock—wryly observed by the filmmakers without comment-—and force jurors to confront questions not raised by the police reports. Eventually, Streets’ panel sees a wrecked and battered alcoholic in the context of her abuse. And Forrar shows jurors something of an unlucky addict in themselves.

“How do I tell the jury who Lam Choi was?” Adachi asks. Kinoy and Yates make the conundrum visual, intercutting scenes of Adachi’s late-night rehearsals--his false starts, his pauses, his abrupt revisions--with images of the chaos that led to the infant Lam’s being swept away in a human storm. Then Adachi marshals facts, showing the unbroken connection between childhood injury and a desperate act committed in the Tenderloin, years later. Ultimately, the work emerges as a public defender’s quintessential argument, the summons to place ourselves in the circumstances of another human being: “Imagine we are in the desert,” Adachi begins, and the invitation is irresistible.

Guilty requires us to recognize that the trial has an singular role in public defense. Neither the civil lawyer’s bargaining chit nor the civil libertarian’s constitutional rite, the jury trial offers the only forum on earth where a PD client’s story will be heard. Indeed, the certainty that a story will remain untold outside the courtroom should create a presumption that--absent a genuinely compelling reason for withholding it—the defense will proceed. Otherwise, we are denied the information that explains what the community is and how it got that way. “I’m always going to be haunted by not having the opportunity to try that case,” Adachi says when Lam accepts a plea bargain before trial. But the complaint has less to do with personal ambition than the loss of air time: Absent the presentation of Lam’s history, twelve San Franciscans will continue to dismiss the consequences of a Southeast Asian diaspora as cultural lawlessness.

If Adachi constructs a personal narrative outside the prosecutor’s case theory, Will Maas builds a human story within it. The effort produces Guilty’s most memorable footage. Representing the suspect in a high-profile murder case, Maas is deluged by images: network depictions of his client as a lethal cyborg; photos of the client’s lovely, laughing victim; police videos of interrogations; and an America’s Most Wanted segment that suggests, through John Walsh’s repeated mispronunciations of the suspect’s name, that no suspect is really entitled to individual identity.

But Maas does something remarkable, establishing his client’s human qualities by revealing his own. To convey the strategy, Guilty juxtaposes trial footage with Maas’ video diary, an intensely personal account of Maas’ fears, his mistakes, and his own inexplicable conduct in Vietnam. In consistently offering his own humanity as issue, Maas opens up the trial, producing a narrative that seems nearer the truth than anything derived from the physical evidence. The point isn’t exculpation but expiation. Eventually, even the prosecutor recognizes the suspect’s human capacity for remorse. If Maas’ method seems aberrational, perhaps it shouldn’t. By film’s end, he has restored law to a kind of grace.

The message we derive from Maas’ private agony is that public defense isn’t produced by appointment. Rather, it is the end product of a hundred tests, a dozen excruciating failures and a thousand dark nights of the soul. “Forgive me,” Maas says in the film’s most moving sequence—Maas’ prayer that, in defending his client, he has not lost his human capacity to mourn the victim. “Sometimes falling into the pit of hopelessness is what you need to open you to an opportunity that’s there,” Adachi says of his own worst pre-trial moment. The point is that building the capacity to defend is excruciating. And it’s supposed to be.

If seminars ("Litigation as Story-Telling") and academic screed ("Nomos and Narrative") have devalued the power of narrative, or overworked the concept of story, they shouldn’t have. Stories have always been the means by which we make sense of our world. And telling is, after all, the only real function of the trial-—not to locate an inviolable truth in fixed facts but to arrive, through the recounting of detail, at the certainty of who we are and how we live and what we value.

God created man because he loved the stories, the adage goes. If so, god produced public defender to ensure those stories would be told. And told they are--in public defender tales that are the sagas of us all.