Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards

Back from a long break with interesting news on the film front. Pamela Yates and Paco de Onis are among the best filmmakers specializing in human rights.  Although not linked to the True Heroes Foundation, their work deserves to be supported as it mostly is about the role of the unknown human rights defenders in the midst of one of the worst, large-scale atrocities of the last 30 years.

“Granito” is a unique story of destinies joined by Guatemala’s past, about how a documentary film intertwined with a nation’s turbulent history emerges as an active player in the present. In 1982, Pamela Yates went to Guatemala to direct her first documentary “When the Mountains Tremble” in the middle of an ongoing genocide during the regime of General Efraín Ríos Montt. A quarter century later, film outtakes from “When the Mountains Tremble,” as well as secret military documents and skeletal remains unearthed by courageous human rights defenders, are all being used in a genocide case to prosecute the military dictators that ordered the genocide of the Maya people, resulting in 200,000 killed.

“Granito” means “tiny grain of sand,” and is a Maya concept of collective change, about how all of us persevering together over time can cause change and bring justice to society. If this message of positive change is to reach the tens of millions of people that will tune in to the Oscars 2012 – without the filmmakers selling their souls to the big theatrical distributors – they have to make make an independent Oscar run. This means they have to fulfill the Academy rules on their own, for which they need support and money. So I joined their campaign by becoming “a Granito” and hope you will do the same on https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/granito/granito-how-to-nail-a-dictator.