"Witnessing is the essence of being a documentary filmmaker," says the director Pamela Yates near the end of her new film, "Granito: How to Nail a Dictator." Rarely has the sentiment rung so true. The new documentary, which opens Wednesday at IFC Center and was co-directed by Ms. Yates and her collaborators Peter Kinoy and Paco de Onis, recounts recent efforts to secure justice for the victims of the Guatemalan genocide in the early 1980s.
Nearly 30 years ago, Ms. Yates, a longtime Brooklynite, went to Guatemala to make "When the Mountains Tremble," a document of the nation's violent and under-reported civil war. It chronicled the related crimes of Efraín Ríos Montt, the dictator whose roving death squads brutalized the country's unarmed indigenous Mayan population. It was ostensibly the end of the story for Ms. Yates—until lawyers prosecuting an international genocide case asked her to comb through the film and its decades-old outtakes for any evidence to be used against Gen. Montt, who now stands accused of war crimes.
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