For 25 years Skylight Pictures has been committed to producing artistic, challenging and socially relevant independent documentary films on issues of human rights and the quest for justice. Through the use of film and digital technologies, we seek to engage, educate and increase understanding of human rights amongst the public at large and policy makers, contributing to informed decisions on issues of social change and the public good.
We walked with Hema tribal spokesman Professor Pilo Kamaragi through the killing fields of Bogoro in the Ituri region of eastern Congo, site of the massacre allegedly perpetrated by local warlord Germain ‘Simba’ Katanga - human skeletons were strewn throughout the tall elephant grass. Katanga was charged by the International Criminal Court with 3 counts of crimes against humanity and 6 counts of war crimes for his involvement in killings, pillaging, using child soldiers, and sexual enslavement during an attack on the town of Bogoro. From a documentary filmmaking point of view, we (our crew: Pamela Yates, Paco de Onís, Melle van Essen, Susan Meiselas, Leo Franssen, Lotsove Tryphonette and Pastor Marrion P’Udongo) had the serendipity of being in Ituri in October when Katanga, who led the FRPI militia, was taken into custody by the International Criminal Court (ICC) to The Hague, to the same prison where his arch-enemy Thomas Lubanga, leader of the Hema UPC militia, has been since last year facing charges of conscripting child soldiers, a war crime under the Rome Statute which governs the ICC. When speaking to members of each of these alleged warlords’ ethnic groups, the Hema for Lubanga and the Lendu for Katanga, they often tell you that their leaders were protectors, not perpetrators. Each group claims to have battled the other in self-defense against genocidal attacks. The tragic result is that tens of thousands of members of both ethnic groups were viciously massacred, raped, dismembered, and a whole generation of youth traumatized by their forced participation in the brutality of war. Until the ICC took Katanga, Lubanga’s Hema people complained that the ICC was being unjust in singling out their leader, but it turns out that he was just the first of several warlords the ICC has in its sights.
Now that Katanga is in custody as well, leaders of both groups are claiming that it’s their Ituri region that’s been targeted, so the conversation has shifted to a national perspective on justice. But they seem resigned to let justice take its course with Lubanga and Katanga, and are actually calling for the ICC to arrest “bigger fish” in Congo’s capital Kinshasa, and to intervene in the Lake Kivu region where so much unspeakable violence is raging.
Even though in recent years there has been less fighting in Ituri and its provincial capital Bunia, the region still bears deep scars of war: buildings in collapse, weapons plentiful, and a people living with a legacy of horror - we saw photos of heads on spikes, rows of heads and severed arms held aloft, displayed as trophies of war by smiling victors, taken as recently as 2003. Yet another replay of humankind’s capacity for unbounded cruelty. Our hotel in Bunia had a “No Weapons” sign on the gate,
and army deserters were assaulting travelers daily a few miles out of town.
We were also accompanied in our visit to Bogoro by one of its former residents, Professor Jean Vianney Tibasima Sahie , who took us to the ruins of the home he had to abandon when his family fled Katanga’s FRPI militia attack. The lush verdant growth of the high central African plateau had engulfed the property, and after pushing our way through shoulder-high grass for a hundred yards we came upon the remains of stately stone arches and hardwood balustrades, ringing an elegant semi-circle veranda overlooking Lake Albert in the far distance.
The specter of another time, conjuring serenity, prosperity and aspiration, a world brought down. It also highlighted the fragility and ephemeral quality of communities riven by underlying tribal tensions wound tight for so long, unresolved, and exacerbated by the colonial experience. Even as I write these lines Kenya has exploded along tribal fault lines due to a disputed presidential election. It was sad and sobering to stand in those evocative remains of a home, in the dignified and melancholy presence of Professor Jean.
It will take time to bring Ituri back to the prosperous agricultural and mining region it once was, and ending the culture of impunity is an essential element in the process - the ICC arrests have made clear that perpetrators will be brought to account, which is a major step towards a lasting peace.
The MONUC peacekeepers have played a stabilizing role by administering a Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration (DDR) program which has helped bring thousands of rebel fighters (many of them child soldiers) back into their communities. After Katanga was taken to The Hague, the last 3 remaining warlords in the Ituri region turned themselves in to accept a DDR offer, apparently no longer seeing any future as rebels and wanting to avoid the ICC.
In the midst of all this catastrophe, we were inspired by local heroes we found working against formidable odds to strengthen justice in the Congo:
Major Innocent, a military judge who keeps a copy of the ICC Rome Statute on his desk to guide him as he judges Congolese military officers and soldiers for human rights abuses. We filmed a hearing at the military tribunal in Bunia, where the defendant had received a life sentence in absentia (he escaped during a previous trial but was later recaptured) for participating in the killing of UN peacekeepers in 2005, and was appealing his sentence. While we weren’t there for the final ruling, in our interview Major Innocent told us that he thinks it’s important to set an example by imposing harsh sentences for human rights violations, so it probably didn’t bode well for the defendant. Even though the defendant was an irregular militia and not in the Congolese army, civilians who commit crimes with military weapons in Congo can be tried under military law. We also met dynamic Richard Pituwa, who runs Canal Revelation, a radio station that has become a crucial forum for talking about justice through “Interactive Radio for Justice”,
a program he produces with the irrepressible human rights activist Wanda Hall. Bunia has no newspapers, and electricity is so sporadic that TV is not a strong medium, but radios run on batteries and are ubiquitous, so radio is far and away the dominant source of information in the region. People call in all day long on their cellphones, and we filmed a fascinating program they hosted with ICC Prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo phoning in from The Hague to take questions about the Katanga arrest from local callers. Justice on the ground and on the air.
After spending October filming in Ituri surrounded by the wreckage of war, we headed for Uganda in a small UN plane, bucking like a bronco through massive thunderclouds towering over the Great Lakes of Africa.
On the same day, Patrick Opiyo Makasi, a Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) Director of Operations, arrived in Uganda after escaping from the LRA redoubt in Congo’s Garamba National Park. It took some doing, but we managed to interview him and got a first-hand account of mounting tensions within the LRA due to the arrest warrants issued for their 5 top leaders by the ICC. Makasi told us that LRA chief Joseph Kony is fixated on making the ICC warrants disappear, and that it’s the only reason he’s remained in peace negotiations since July 2006, which has brought the longest relief from violence in the 20-year conflict suffered by the people of northern Uganda. He added that Kony is fully aware of the arrests of Charles Taylor and Thomas Lubanga, and does not want to follow them to the ICC courtroom in The Hague.
Makasi says Kony has no intention of signing a peace agreement even if the warrants are removed, and it is only fear of the ICC that has kept him quiet and at the peace table all this time. Apparently Kony’s closest ally, the ruthless Vincent Otti, actually wanted to achieve a peace deal, and it was disagreement over this that led Kony to murder Otti in October. The murder of Otti has not been officially confirmed, but Makasi is sure of it and other LRA fighters that defected after him have all said he was killed in a very brutal way, plus no one has heard a peep from Otti since October - and this silence from a man that used to get on his satellite phone every day making calls to radio stations and political leaders. There are indications that the LRA is under great strain, and MONUC, the UN peacekeeping mission in Congo, has set up stations to receive and demobilize LRA soldiers that defect. It appears the ICC is having a beneficial effect for the people of northern Uganda, by keeping the LRA at bay and weakening its morale. The ICC indictees are finally realizing that amnesty is not an option.
A remarkable effect of the ICC interventions are the fierce debates it has generated about the role of justice in the transition to sustainable peace. When we spent the month of December 2006 in northern Uganda, many local civil society leaders were calling for the ICC to remove the arrest warrants it had issued for the top commanders of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), saying that it was hampering the peace negotiations, and that traditional reconciliation mechanisms such as Mato Oput would suffice to achieve justice for the massive crimes committed by the LRA. Now that’s changed.
We revisited Pagak Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camp leader Dennis Lemoyi and interviewed him again a year later, which gave us valuable insights into how thinking about justice is trending in northern Uganda. Now civil society leaders are recommending that a special national court be created in Uganda to mount a “complementarity” challenge to the ICC warrants, saying that the crimes committed during the war, by both the LRA and the UPDF (Ugandan army) can be judged at home and meet international standards of accountability. We’ll have to wait to see how things develop, but that this discussion is even happening constitutes a positive outcome of the ICC intervention.
With New York in the grip of winter, we (Peter Kinoy and Pamela Yates) went out with our union brothers and sisters to walk the Writers Guild picket lines.
From HBO, to Viacom, to the Time-Warner Center, the writers are asking for a fair share of the profits they help create. The principal reason the Writers Guild is on strike is that we want a fair share of the income generated by programs we create that are increasingly distributed on digital platforms like the internet, iTunes downloads, and video on demand. The networks, film studios and media corporations, represented by The Association of Motion Pictures and Television Producers (AMPTP) say that the value of the internet is unknown; that a dollar amount cannot be placed on it. That’s what they said about the nascent home video market during the last strike 20 years ago, and the Writers Guild conceded a bargaining position that would temporarily reduce their royalty to only $.04 on every VHS (and later DVD) sold while AMPTP developed the home video market. The market exploded, but AMPTP never increased the writers’ royalties again, and now is making the same argument regarding the new digital platforms in order to maintain the same low percentage (fool me once...). The Writers Guild is seeking to double the percentage, which would amount to about $.08 per DVD, not an outrageous request. If AMPTP doesn’t see any clear financial potential in the digital realm, how do they come up with the figures for the billion-dollar copyright infringement lawsuits they initiate, like Viacom’s against YouTube?
When you think about it, the writers’ demand for fair compensation in these new markets isn’t so different from our negotiations as independent filmmakers for licensing our films in the digital realm. Recently we licensed our film “State of Fear” to US Television, and the broadcaster asked that we throw in, at no extra charge, video-on-demand (VOD) rights. We insisted that it was only fair that we get a share of each VOD sale and after standing firm against the broadcaster’s argument that the company did not know what the value of this digital platform would be, we were able to negotiate a per download percentage share. So the precedent set if the Writers Guild prevails will affect each and every independent filmmaker in the form a potential new revenue streams, an additional royalty, and an easier time negotiating our rights.
The networks, studios and media corporations have deep pockets. AMPTP has broken off negotiations, and would like to wait out the Guild. It may be a long cold strike, but it will be shorter and it will feel warmer if the independent film community supports the writers. Go to www.wga.org, find out where the next picket line is, and join us. Everyone should share in the proceeds of this brave new digital world.
For all the inside information and news about the strike, go to Nikki Finke’s great blog www.deadlinehollywooddaily.com and read the series “Why We Write” by striking Guild members. Here’s a video we found on YouTube that explains why we fight:
Ex-President of Peru Alberto Fujimori went on trial for human rights crimes,
appropriately enough, on Human Rights Day, December 10. He started out with a dramatic opening speech, waving his arms about and yelling “Soy inocente!” (I’m innocent!). He claims to have safeguarded the human rights of 25 million Peruvians, “without exception”.
As the trial unfolds it brings to the fore one of the great debates of our times, how do democratic societies deal with the threat of terrorism and maintain the rule of law? Fujimori supporters believe the rule of law was expendable in light of the terrorist threat that Peru faced, and the Peruvian Truth & Reconciliation Commission, as we showed in State of Fear, concluded the opposite. It is a historic trial, and has already generated a cellphone ringtone that spread like wildfire throughout Peru, that starts with Fujimori shouting “Soy inocente!” followed by the judge saying “Aquí mando yo” (I’m in charge here) and for good measure ends with King Juan Carlos saying “Por que no te callas” from the time he told Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to shut up - all of this over Fujimori’s campaign song from 2000, El Baile del Chino. Here it is:
After the initial elation of hearing that Peru’s ex-President, Alberto Fujimori, was finally being extradited from Chile to Peru to face human rights and corruption charges,
it was shocking but not surprising to see the old thuggish tactics of Fujimori’s supporters at work again: “El Ojo Que Llora” (The Eye That Cries), a memorial in Lima to the 70,000 people killed in Peru’s war with Shining Path, was defaced with orange paint (the color of Fujimori’s party) by a group of vandals. In recent years the memorial had become a gathering place to further peace and reconciliation, where the annual commemoration of the delivery of Peru’s Truth & Reconciliation Commission Final Report (on August 29, 2003) is held. El Ojo Que Llora, created by artist Lika Mutal, is in the network of the International Coalition of Historic Sites of Conscience, in recognition of its profound significance as a bastion of the collective memory of a nation emerging from mass atrocities. See it in this video:
Of course the Fujimoristas felt threatened by the serene power of this memorial, it’s 70,000 stones laid out in a labyrinth a constant reminder of the reign of terror and corruption that Peru lived during Fujimori’s regime, as exemplified by politician Martha Chavez, one of Fujimori’s staunchest supporters and allies, who declared that “With pleasure, I would have destroyed the memorial myself.”
We sent the following letter to the Editor of The New York Times to critique their coverage of Fujimori’s extradition to Peru and the historical narrative he successfully spun during his time in power and that persists to this day. Although the NY Times didn’t publish it, we shared the letter with Mirko Lauer, one of Peru’s foremost opinion makers, who did publish it in his column:
“To the Editor:
It’s a shame that in his article (Chile Returns Fujimori to Peru to Face Charges - 9/23/07) Simon Romero reinforces the historical narrative promoted by Alberto Fujimori that he was responsible for crushing the Shining Path movement in Peru. This is a distortion of the facts. In fact, as the Peruvian Truth & Reconciliation Commission concluded in its Final Report, the biggest blow to terrorism in Peru was the capture of Shining Path leader Abimael Guzmán, a capture that was executed without firing a shot after a 5-year police investigation that had started before Mr. Fujimori took power, led by Detective Benedicto Jimenez and his small counter-terrorism team, known as the GEIN (Special Intelligence Group). Mr. Fujimori preferred a military approach to terrorism which led to an increase in the Shining Path insurgency with car bombs exploding in Lima almost daily. Mr. Jimenez treated terrorism as a criminal problem that had to be solved through old fashioned detective work, and was disdained and underfunded by Mr. Fujimori. When the capture of Mr. Guzmán occurred on a Saturday night, Mr. Fujimori was on a weekend fishing trip, completely unaware of the operation, and raced back to Lima when he heard the news. Not wanting to be upstaged by Mr. Jimenez, Mr. Fujimori promptly dismissed him.
--
Paco de Onís, Pamela Yates, Peter Kinoy”
As we showed in our film State of Fear, Fujimori was a master manipulator of the media, and nothing makes it clearer than this video clip we edited showing footage shot with a hidden camera set up by Fujimori’s spy chief and master of corruption, Vladimiro Montesinos. We call it “Latin America’s First Media Dictator” - see for yourself:
I met Rigoberta Menchú 25 years ago, when I was making my first feature length documentary “When the Mountains Tremble”.
The film tells the story of war and social revolution in Guatemala and the struggle of the largely Indian peasantry against a legacy of state and foreign oppression. Tom Sigel (co-director) and I had been filming all sides in the war - the military forces, the guerrillas, and members of civil society. Rigoberta became the protagonist of the film and her personal story was the thread that wove “When the Mountains Tremble” together. She was in exile, and her Spanish was still spotty, but the film helped introduce her to the world and 10 years later she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Now Rigoberta has broken new ground in her lifelong drive to transform Guatemala - she’s the first Mayan woman to run for President! I was lucky to be in Guatemala with my filmmaking partners Peter and Paco when she launched her campaign last month with the Encuentro Por Guatemala party - it was an exhilarating feeling to see her waving to crowds from a flatbed truck, in the company of Nineth Montenegro – these are two outstanding women running on a platform of increased rights for poor and indigenous people, and an end to the drug-trafficking mafia that has turned Guatemala into a major transshipment point from Colombia to US markets.
Considering the violent power wielded by criminal drug gangs in Guatemala, this may seem like a quixotic quest, but I admire Rigoberta and Nineth’s courageous campaign and wish them great success.
Speaking of quixotic quests, Rigoberta also spearheaded a drive to end impunity for top military leaders and police accused of perpetrating a counter-insurgency war and scorched-earth policy against Guatemalan civilians in the early 1980s. She did this by appealing to the Audiencia Nacional in Spain, the same court that served the arrest warrant for Augusto Pinochet in 1998 under the principle of universal jurisdiction. Under this same principle, the court accepted Rigoberta’s argument and issued arrest warrants for the gravest violators on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity, including former president General Efraín Ríos Montt – tough legal battles lie ahead, but the simple fact that these arrest warrants are being upheld is a significant step towards bringing the perpetrators to account. Ríos Montt is also facing charges for crimes against humanity brought against him by the Center for Human Rights Legal Action (CALDH), a tenacious group of human rights advocates that have to work behind double-security doors.
Peter and I decided to make a sequel to the original film because “When the Mountains Tremble”, and additional hours of “outs” that didn’t make it into the final edit had been requested as filmic evidence in the genocide cases. The new film will include these new cases and Guatemala’s ongoing transition to democracy and the rule of law, and ponder how a documentary film can make a difference. Here is the trailer to “When the Mountains Tremble”:
But this new film will also incorporate “When the Mountains Tremble”, because 25 years later so many of the original participants in “When the Mountains Tremble” are still players in Guatemala’s ongoing political/social drama.
We went to Guatemala recently to lay the groundwork for this new film and found Rigoberta stronger and more active than ever; I reconnected with Frank LaRue, the labor lawyer who for many years lived in exile, and now holds a cabinet position as the President’s Human Rights Commissioner; I found former Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP) leader Pablo Ceto training indigenous people on how to run for and assume elected positions in the highlands through his Fundación Maya. I wasn’t able to meet again (yet) with former President General Efraín Ríos Montt, but saw “Wanted for Crimes Against Humanity” posters for him even as the city and countryside were plastered with his party’s campaign slogans. He has maintained a strong power base all these years, and is running for a congressional seat that he will likely win, which under Guatemalan law would grant him immunity from prosecution. This tension between impunity and the rule of law runs high in Guatemala, and is epitomized by the parallel campaigns of Ríos Montt and Rigoberta.
This tension is also revealed in the extraordinary National Police archives unearthed by Guatemalan human rights activists, 80 million documents piled floor to ceiling in an abandoned building surrounded by a police-training base. Some of the people organizing this chaotic trove were formerly targets of the apparatus of state repression who may discover that the disappearance of their family members is detailed in the police documents.
Probably my most disarming discovery was to find “Rafael” (his nom de guerre), a former guerrilla in the squad that shot down the military helicopter I was riding in (and filming from) in 1982. As destiny would have it General Benedicto Lucas García, the feared head of the Guatemalan Armed Forces, was piloting the helicopter.
Due to our emergency landing and the near death experience we shared, the General took me into his confidence, which enabled me to document in words and images the Army’s genocidal scorched earth policy against the Mayan civilian population in the highlands and bring it to the attention of the world. Now General Lucas García is one of those charged in the warrants issued as a result of Rigoberta’s tireless pursuit of justice.
So this is the panorama in today’s Guatemala that will be woven with “When the Mountains Tremble” to create our new film, which we are calling “Granito”.
After observing the reactions of viewers of “State of Fear” at screenings all over the world, Pamela and Peter and I are left with the feeling that the film acts as a kind of Rorschach test, since the most diverse audiences seem to like the film for their own particular reasons, whether it be Nepali pro-democracy activists, Russian human rights defenders, U.S. military personnel, Peruvian victims of political violence, Latin American leftists, U.S. citizens concerned about civil liberties, and so forth...
This feeling was recently reinforced when we won two great prizes from very different worlds, essentially validating our work from very different political perspectives. One was the Habana Film Festival “Prize for Best Film or Video About Latin America by a non-Latin American Director” and the other was the Overseas Press Club award for “Best Reporting in Any Medium on Latin America”. We had a lovely evening at the Mandarin Hotel in the Time Warner Center, to receive the OPC award in the company of our good friends Marlene Braga, Bruni Burres, Paul van Zyl and Alex Wilde, all of them fellow travelers on the long “State of Fear” journey - it was only fitting that we share the acclaim.
I call the course “The Art and Soul of Documentary Editing”. I am working with a group of young people on an intensive one-week workshop at Casa Comal, a community media center in Guatemala City.
For seven years Casa Comal has almost single-handedly built a skills base in cinema basics among young people here. I first met the “Comales” (as they call themselves) four years ago when they invited me to show our 1983 release “When the Mountains Tremble” in its first public presentation in Guatemala, after having been informally banned for 20 years, seen only in clandestine screenings during that time. It was an unforgettable night, but that’s another story. Suffice it to say that I’d been looking for a way to come back to Guatemala and do something with Casa Comal ever since.
So when Skylight Pictures decided to return to Guatemala to continue an exploration begun 20 years earlier with “When the Mountains Tremble”, I contacted Casa Comal’s two founding leaders, Elias Jimenez and Rafael Rosal, and we cooked up this course.
Casa Comal has taken on the task of raising the level of independent film not only in Guatemala but also throughout Central America. They have a year-round school to train students, a production unit that produces an independent feature film a year (in a country where you can count homegrown features on one hand) and they organize the fabulous Icaro film festival with participants from across Central America.
My workshop lasts a week. In that short time I present the methodology of documentary editing, and the students divide up to work on four Adobe Premiere edit systems, each group using the same batch of footage used to create a scene in our last film, “State of Fear.”
Squeezed in the middle somewhere Casa Comal has me speak on their weekly cultural radio show. Then on the last day we watch each group’s cut, after which I reveal the scene I had cut for “State of Fear” from the same footage. And alongside the craft there are passionate discussions of “what is a documentary” and “what is the responsibility of the documentary filmmaker.”
Guatemala has almost no independent documentary tradition, and needs it badly. But then I suppose that might be said about a great many places in this beautiful and troubled world.
The Tribeca Film Festival is in full swing here in NY, and we just watched a remarkable film (actually five short films by five directors, produced by Spanish actor Javier Bardem in association with Doctors Without Borders) about invisible victims of conflict and disease in five different countries. This may sound depressing but the way the stories were handled really should inspire you to action. Two films that really stood out were one by Wim Wenders set in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and one by Spanish/Peruvian documentary maker Javier Corcuera (who also made The Back of the World and Winter in Baghdad, two memorable docs) that follows a group of Colombians returning to their land after being forcibly displaced by paramilitary groups. Here is the trailer of Invisibles - don’t miss it if you have chance to see it…
I’ve been struck by the recent spate of films that tell stories of police states and the courage of individuals that defy them. In the narrative fiction realm there were two magnificent films nominated for Academy Awards: Pan’s Labyrinth and The Lives of Others (both won Oscars in different categories). In each case the story takes us deep into a police state when it is firmly entrenched, when the apparatus seems impregnable and resistance might seem futile...but both lead us into inspiring, if bittersweet, tales of the courage of convictions and the illuminating spirit of individuals who band together to defy brutal oppression, one during the 1940s in Franco’s fascist Spain, the other during the 1970s and 80s in East Germany when the Stasi secret police ruled daily life. Pamela and I are currently at the Montreal Human Rights Film Festival, where we saw an eye-opening short film called Democracy 76: My State of Emergency, about the Egyptian police state and the relentless violence, intimidation and torture it used against dissidents during the run up to the 2005 “elections” called with 3 months notice – several Egyptian dissidents interviewed in the film mentioned how difficult it was to overcome the “fear factor”, as they called it, to protest this inherently flawed election, yet they kept going into the streets, knowing they would likely get beaten or arrested or even killed, as so many did. Here is the film:
During the international outreach campaign we did after releasing State of Fear we crossed paths a couple of times with Tanya Lokshina, a Russian human rights activist who reminds us of those courageous individuals we see in the films.
The first time we met Tanya was in Moscow at a State of Fear screening where our Q&A session was shut down when audience members started comparing President Putin’s expansion of power to President Fujimori’s power grab in Peru in the 90s. Tanya had been instrumental in getting State of Fear shown in Moscow, along with Yuri Dzhibladze (another dedicated human rights defender). After the startling shutdown of our Q&A we went to a restaurant where we learned just how precarious it is to be a human rights defender in Russia today – click here to listen to this recent NPR story where Tanya is interviewed, and you’ll get a sense of the courage it takes to continue speaking truth to power in Putin’s Russia.
The second time we crossed paths with Tanya (and Yuri) was at
the Human Rights Defenders Policy Forum at the Carter Center in Atlanta in May 2006. This is a remarkable annual gathering of human rights defenders from all over the world, hosted by President Jimmy Carter (and on this occasion co-hosted by Louise Arbour, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights) and co-organized by Human Rights First. We were there to screen State of Fear, and spent 2 days listening to about 30 fellow human rights defenders from all over the globe tell tales of resistance to abuses of power - one of the most effective human rights tools is the documentation and airing of these abuses, which is what we do in our human rights work through film. We were inspired by the stories of our colleagues, and salute the Carter Center and Human Rights First for bringing us all together.
Some films inspire me; keep my imagination alive, my life rich. And of all these films there is one that keeps my dreams for a better, peaceful, more just world seem possible. I go back to it often in these dark days. It is Chile, Obstinate Memory by Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzmán.
Patricio has turned the seminal trauma of his youth, the death of President Salvador Allende in a coup d’etat and the subjugation of Chile’s long-established democracy by General Augusto Pinochet, into a meditation on memory and forgetting. During the Pinochet dictatorship, the military’s version of history was imposed, where they appeared as the heroic guardians of social order. Like a messenger from the past, after 23 years in exile Patricio returns to Chile with The Battle of Chile, his unflinching chronicle of the long-ago coup d’etat. Censored for all these years, Patricio shows the film for the first time to a generation raised under military rule, jarring their conscience and questioning their collective memory. Obstinate Memory creates a dynamic tension between the older generation that lived through the creation and then brutal destruction of a popular democratic movement, and the younger generation that has been taught that the destruction of this movement was necessary to save Chile from chaos and Communism.
Obstinate Memory is brilliant personal cinema of universal dimensions. Patricio sparsely narrates the film. His emotional restraint yet deep connection is felt in every slow dolly, every extreme close up, and in every silence. He weaves personal stories of courage and resistance to the coup d’etat with older people’s ideas about the meaning of memory. José Balmes, the Chilean artist who has done a series of paintings based on photographs from the day of the coup, finds that, “Memory and forgetting are recurrent questions. Like the positive and the negative, the action and thought, of human beings during their lifetime.” Or Ernesto, the soulful teacher at the heart of the film who simply says, “ ‘Recordar’ (Spanish for remembering) comes from the Latin ‘re’ and ‘cordum’, the heart. ‘Re’ return. Which means, ‘returning to the heart’…to wake up again.”
I was a young photojournalist working in Chile during the last year of the Popular Unity government of Salvador Allende (the subject of Guzman’s The Battle of Chile). What I saw, what I absorbed, what I learned in that year has inspired all the films I’ve made from When the Mountains Tremble to State of Fear and now The Court of Last Resort. So Chile is an obstinate memory for me too. It breathes life and hope into the darkest moments, because it was a time when people dared to dream of justice, the right to an education, good health and a roof over all heads. It was a noble dream. The failure of that dream was hard to take. As Ernesto, the charismatic teacher in the film says, “You can’t progress without dreams. Because dreams are the way we understand life.”
10 years after Obstinate Memory was finished General Pinochet was facing trial for corruption and human rights violations before he passed away, and Michele Bachelet, a former torture victim whose father was killed by the military regime, became President. The dream may yet flourish a quarter century later, because the memory was kept alive.
Patricio Guzmán dedicates Obstinate Memory to his daughters Andrea and Camila. Camila is a filmmaker whose debut documentary The Sugar Curtain premiered at the Toronto Film Festival. And Andrea is part of the DocuSur team, a vibrant Spanish film festival dedicated to the genre of documentary filmmaking. The dream lives on.
While we are making our films we always have a primary audience in mind, but in the case of State of Fear we had two. One was the Peruvian people, as we wanted our film to perpetuate the landmark examination of a war on terror revealed in the Final Report of the Peruvian Truth & Reconciliation Commission.
The other was the U.S., because we felt Americans needed to see the tragic consequences of the Peruvian experience with their “war on terror”, full of alarming parallels to the U.S. approach to terrorism after 9/11. What we hadn’t anticipated was how much the findings of Peru’s Truth Commission would resonate with audiences around the world – the use of fear of terrorism by elected leaders to expand their power was brought up in every Q&A at film festivals all over the world – when a student raised this issue after our screening at the Stalker Human Rights Festival in Moscow, Pamela commented that she thought that’s why our film had been invited, and the ensuing cheering and uproar caused the nervous festival director to shut down the Q&A!
In the 2 years since its release, State of Fear has resonated with human rights defenders throughout the world. It’s been translated into 48 languages and broadcast in 157 countries, and has been selected to participate in dozens of international human rights film festivals, including:
• It was the “Opening Night Film” at the 2005 Human Rights Watch International Film Festival in New York and was selected for their US traveling film festival.
• It was chosen as “Best of Fest” at the 2006 Human Rights Watch International Film Festival in London.
• It received the “Audience Award” at the 2005 Amnesty International EXPOSE Film Festival in Los Angeles and was selected to be on the AI traveling film festival.
• It was an Official Selection of the 2005 Stalker Human Rights Film Festival in Moscow.
• It toured major Human Rights festivals of European cities the entire month of March 2006, including London, Amsterdam, The Hague, Paris, Geneva and Bologna.
• It was selected to open the First Brazilian Human Rights Film Festival in 2006, screening in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Brasilia, and Recife.
• It received the 2006 “Henry Hampton Award for Excellence in Film & Video” from the Council on Foundations.
• A special screening of State of Fear was held at the headquarters of the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
• It was selected to screen at the 2006 Human Rights Defenders Forum at the Carter Center in Atlanta, hosted by President Jimmy Carter and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Barbour.
• It was invited by Spanish Judge Baltazar Garzón to participate in Transatlantic Dialogues, a symposium he held at NYU Law School. The symposium will become part of a book.
Examples of how State of Fear has been embraced by human rights activists:
• The Peruvian National Human Rights Coordinator, comprising 63 human rights organizations throughout Peru, is using State of Fear as an educational tool to maintain awareness of the findings of the Peruvian Truth Commission, and is will distribute 1,000 DVDs of the Quechua-language version of State of Fear throughout the Andes, in the areas most affected by the violence.
• After the arrest of ex-President Alberto Fujimori in Chile when he attempted to return to Peru, Peruvian national television station Canal 7 broadcast State of Fear multiple times to remind the general public of the atrocities committed during Fujimori’s authoritarian regime.
• While the Chilean government is considering Peru’s request to extradite Fujimori, Peruvian human rights activists have held screenings on State of Fear in Chile to educate the Chilean public on the findings of the Peruvian Truth Commission regarding Fujimori’s regime.
• After State of Fear screened in Nepal at the Films South Asia festival in 2005, Nepali human rights defenders produced a Nepali-language version of the film and distributed over 200 DVDs to pro-democracy and human rights activists throughout Nepal.
• In Russia human rights organizations have been using the Russian-language version of State of Fear to illustrate the dangers faced by a democracy when leaders use fear of terrorism to consolidate authoritarian power especially as it pertains to Putin’s policy towards Chechnya.
• In Northern Ireland State of Fear is used as an educational tool in ongoing efforts to establish a Truth Commission.
• In Colombia State of Fear is being used by human rights activists to explore conflict resolution methods to bring an end to 50 years of violence in the war-torn country.
Theatrical release and television broadcasts of State of Fear:
• National Geographic Channels International broadcast State of Fear in 154 countries in 45 languages reaching 170 million homes. It was selected to launch the first season of the NGCI series “No Borders”.
• State of Fear had its theatrical premiere in New York City at the Film Forum.
It went on to showcase in 45 American cities. In addition, the film was selected to tour in 8 cities on the 2006 Southern Circuit-Tour of Independent filmmakers.
• The History Channel en Español (US) launched its 2006 fall season with State of Fear.
• Sundance Channel will premiere the English version of State of Fear in Fall 2007.
• More than 300 US universities and colleges have purchased the State of Fear DVD.
During the regime of Alberto Fujimori in Peru (1990-2000) his éminence grise was Vladimiro Montesinos, who wielded power with mountains of cash and the brutal “Grupo Colina” death squad - the apparatus that Fujimori and Montesinos set up is often referred to in Peru as the “Fujimontesinos Mafia”. One of their most insidious strategies was to buy the cooperation of nearly all of Peru’s media moguls, thereby exercising practically complete control of the news. Fortunately for posterity, Montesinos secretly videotaped his bribery sessions as insurance in case anyone changed their mind. We’ve used that footage to create a short film about what Peruvian Truth Commissioner Carlos Iván Degregori has called “Latin America’s First Media Dictatorship” - see for yourself…
We’ve been in production since September on The Court of Last Resort (working title), our film about the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague. The ICC is the first permanent international judicial body capable of trying individuals for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes when national courts are unable or unwilling to do so (for a good overview of the ICC go to the site of the Coalition for the ICC). The ICC currently has one person in custody, the Congolese militant Thomas Lubanga Dyilo, who is accused of recruiting child soldiers to his militia organization. Anyone who is wondering how grave a crime it is to turn children into soldiers should read “A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier” by Ismael Beah, a harrowing tale by a former child soldier from Sierra Leone, or pick up a copy of “Innocents Lost: When Child Soldiers Go To War” by Jimmie Briggs, an excellent account of the experiences of child soldiers around the world interviewed by the intrepid author.
So far we’ve filmed many interviews and activities at ICC headquarters in The Hague, and at the Assembly of States Parties (ASP - the governing body of the ICC) in November, setting the stage for the global purview of the ICC and the challenges it faces in its early years.
We’ve had the good fortune to have a fantastic crew from Holland that we’ve dubbed “The Dutch Masters” - Melle van Essen (camera), Sigrid Tijssen (lights) and Leo Franssen (sound and tomato salads). And last but not least our wonderful production assistant Mira Zeehandelaar.
We’ve also been filming in northern Uganda, where the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), led by Joseph Kony, has been waging war against the Ugandan government for 20 years, but mostly has committed terrible atrocities on the civilian population in the north. Arrest warrants were publicly announced and unsealed by the ICC on 14 October 2005 for Kony and four other leaders of the LRA. We spent the whole month of December 2006 in Uganda in the overcrowded Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps of the north, talking to LRA victims and investigating emblematic cases like the ones described in the ICC arrest warrants.
Men and women who barely survived LRA massacres gave us wrenching testimonials, and a formerly abducted child led us to the place where he and his fellow students were taken from their dormitory by the LRA and described how they were forced to become child soldiers and perpetrators of atrocities.
When we arrived in Uganda in December peace talks had been underway for 6 months, between the LRA leaders and the Ugandan government of President Yoweri Museveni. Most of the people we spoke to in the IDP camps are skeptical that the peace talks will actually result in a signed agreement, as no one seems to trust Kony or Museveni. Nevertheless they desperately hope the peace will somehow hold and that the 20-year war is drawing to a close. Some we spoke to believe that the ICC warrants have scared Kony into continuing with the peace talks, while others feel that the warrants are getting in the way of peace - perhaps it is a bit of both. What’s certain is that the LRA leaders are demanding that the ICC warrants are voided in order to sign a peace deal, and that intervening in an ongoing conflict presents thorny difficulties for the ICC. The tension of the seemingly opposed interests of peace and justice has divided the international humanitarian/human rights community and turned many well-intentioned people against the ICC, which seems so bizarre considering how much support the ICC received from these same organizations during its creation.
We’re shooting on high-definition video (HD), so the footage looks spectacular, stunning images rich with color and depth - it really captures the vibrancy of life in northern Uganda now as the peace talks between the LRA and Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni’s government move into their seventh month. In morning light the red dirt roads are filled with streams of people venturing forth from squalid IDP camps to till rich outlying land long fallow and overgrown with elephant grass, restoring a modicum of normalcy to their lives.
We captured the courage and hope of the Acholi people hanging on to this tenuous peace, truly celebrating Christmas for the first time in 20 years (at left is a group of evangelical Christians celebrating Christmas in an IDP camp), with candlelight vigils, singing traditional songs in beautiful harmony, dressing up as best they could for the occasion, traveling to the local trading centers to congregate at the markets. How much has the ICC contributed to this peace, and how will justice be done in an ongoing conflict situation? These are questions our film will examine...
One of the most worrisome things about our shoot for The Court of Last Resort (working title) ICC film in The Hague and especially Uganda last November/December was going out with the Panasonic HVX-200 camera for the first time, using P2 memory cards instead of videotape. But the HVX-200 was the only affordable way to shoot in High-Definition (HD), and we had already committed to going the HD route for this film – in our first 2 shoots for the project we had rented the much more robust Panasonic Varicam HD camera, but soon realized that on a production schedule as long as ours (at least 1 year), the Varicam was beyond our means. Everyone told us we were crazy to go out to the middle of Africa with a recording system we weren’t familiar with, but we decided to take the plunge!
Nevertheless, it was nerve-wracking going to a place as remote as northern Uganda with no videotape or film, only P2 memory cards that must be downloaded in the field to a portable drive so that you can in turn erase the cards and use them again, in a process that’s come to be known as the “mediaflow”. We kept wondering, “what if the drives crash?” and “what if there are unexpected software glitches that need to be solved in the field?” and so forth. I became the designated mediaflow guy, and my set up consisted of a Panasonic Toughbook laptop where I would plug in the memory cards, a portable 100G drive velcroed to the bottom of it to receive the downloads, and a RAID 2 hard drive with 2 250G drives at the hotel room to which I would download everything accumulated during the day, with RAID automatic backup. I had a total of 10 250G drives with me (5 with a backup for each one), and by the end of a 4-week shoot had filled 4 of them, 1 Terabyte.
It was hard for everyone to adjust at first to the idea of all our media being just data files flowing from one drive to the next, but all went well and in a few days the whole crew got used to this new system. The little Toughbook even lived up to its name when it fell on its face in an IDP camp, smack on its LCD screen just a few minutes after the photo at left was taken, and didn’t even interrupt the download!
It was worth all the risk though, because when we returned to NY and watched the footage on a proper HD monitor, it really looked spectacular – it’s really great that HD has finally become affordable - we’re already looking forward to our next shoot.
“In the Quechua language, the past is in front of us, because we’ve already lived it, we see it clearly. The future is behind us because it hasn’t happened yet”.
Julián Aguilar, Quechua narrator in “State of Fear”
It’s something like sitting on a train facing backwards - you can see what’s passed by in front of you, but what’s still ahead of the train is behind you. Paco and I spent a week in Lima to holed up in a studio with 4 Quechua speakers from Radio Cultural Amauta, Huanta, Ayacucho, translating “State of Fear”. It will be the first feature length film to be dubbed into the Quechua language. Because 70% of the victims of Peru’s war on terror were Quechua speakers, we thought it was of critical importance to make this version.
But how to attempt to understand the profound differences in the Quechua cosmovision and our own linear approach to the past, the effect that it has on us in the present and how we understand our future? Because “State of Fear” begins in the present, flashes back 20 years, then flashes forward to the present often, we agonized over how to translate lines like, “ Because of what Vera (Lentz) photographed back then, it would be 20 years before she dared return”.
Or the Quechua concept of “reconciliation”. “State of Fear” is based on the findings of Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, so reconciliation and memory are clearly important ideas throughout the film. In Quechua the word reconcile means “to bury” or “to forget”. And because Quechua dwells very much in the present, when a memory is recalled, it is felt as deeply as if one is experiencing it for the first time.
I came to have an enormous new appreciation for the beauty and complexity of Quechua---the words with 16 syllables, the warmth of the phrases, and the elocution of the radio announcers, our Andean collaborators who became the different voices of the characters in “State of Fear”. Imagine Lima lawyer Beatriz Alba Hart speaking Quechua!
site of the massacre allegedly perpetrated by local warlord Germain ‘Simba’ Katanga - human skeletons were strewn throughout the tall elephant grass. Katanga was charged by the International Criminal Court with 3 counts of crimes against humanity and 6 counts of war crimes for his involvement in killings, pillaging, using child soldiers, and sexual enslavement during an attack on the town of Bogoro. From a documentary filmmaking point of view, we (our crew: 
