Alejandra García by Dana Lixenberg

PLANET spoke to Yates — co-founder of Skylight Pictures, and director of documentaries including State of Fear: The Truth About Terrorism and The Reckoning: The Battle for the International Criminal Court — at her home in Brooklyn.

What drew you to Guatemala in the first place?
I was a sound recorder for other people’s films, and I was working on a crew in El Salvador and Nicaragua when I heard about the rebellion, the hidden war in the mountains of Guatemala. I read that Guatemalan journalists were killed trying to cover the story, and that foreign journalists were being deported, so I thought this is a story I’d really like to tell. I had also read the book Bitter Fruit by Stephen Kinzer and Steven Schlesinger, a detailed account of how the CIA had overturned the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz in 1954, and it made me so angry that our country had engineered this coup, which then ushered in this series of military dictatorships, that I felt as a U.S. citizen that I should expose what was going on in Guatemala and link it what had happened in 1954.

Granito features several different, often moving, stories of those affected by the genocide.
I think if you’re going to deal with a really difficult subject and you’re going to have survivors of mass genocide or mass violence in the film, you need to have people who understand what’s happened to them and have found a way forward. They’re actually using something that would defeat most of us, as a strength. In my mind, these are all heroes who show the way forward. Granito is actually a very hopeful film.