A Skylight Production

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 including 45,000 disappeared. 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.

A veces una película hace historia, no sólo la documenta. Así ocurre con Granito, el asombroso nuevo documental de Pamela Yates. En parte thriller político, en parte memorias, Yates nos transporta atrás en el tiempo a través de un fascinante y evocador relato de un genocidio y vuelve al presente de la mano de unos personajes unidos por el destino y por la búsqueda para llevar a un dictador terrible ante la justicia.