Feature | Thur Mar 28, 7:30 pm

Benefit for the Canadian Centre for International Justice

Trailer • Official Site
Djavad Mowafaghian Cinema • 104 min

BEST CREATIVE DOCUMENTARY – PARIS INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

An Official Selection of the 2011 Sundance Film Festival

Live introduction from New York via Skype with director Pamela Yates

Djavad Mowafaghian Cinema
Goldcorp Centre for the Arts, SFU
149 W. Hastings, Vancouver BC

Synopsis: Granito: How to Nail a Dictator tells the extraordinary story of a how a film, aiding a new generation of human rights activists, became a granito — a tiny grain of sand — that helped tip the scales of justice.

[Granito How to Nail a Dictator]…is a story of destinies joined by Guatemala’s past, and how a documentary film intertwined with a nation’s turbulent history emerges as an active player in the present. In Granito our characters sift for clues buried in archives of mind and place and historical memory, seeking to uncover a narrative that could unlock the past and settle matters of life and death in the present. Each of the five main characters whose destinies collide in Granito are connected by Guatemala’s past. In 1982, Guatemala was engulfed in an armed conflict during which a genocidal “scorched earth” campaign by the military killed nearly 200,000 Maya people and disappeared another 20,000. Now, as if a watchful Maya god were weaving back together threads of a story unraveled by the passage of time, forgotten by most, our characters become integral to the overarching narrative of wrongs done and justice sought that they have pieced together, each adding their granito, their tiny grain of sand, to the epic tale. Source: Skylight

Director: Pamela Yates
Editor: Peter Kinoy
Producer: Paco de Onís

Net proceeds of this event will go to the the Canadian Centre for International Justice

About the Canadian Centre for International Justice

The Canadian Centre for International Justice is a charitable organization that works with survivors of genocide, torture and other atrocities to seek redress and to bring perpetrators to justice.

Supported by SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement