For more than twenty years, Pamela Yates has been telling the stories no one wants to hear - from the existence of chronic poverty during economic boom times to US-backed genocide and its consequences around the world. That the average filmgoer remains unfamiliar with Yates's name is a telling sign of her touching and quiet brand of documentary filmmaking. Her appeal lies in the fact that she is not a sensationalist, even though she had the distinction of producing TV Nation's most censored episodes. When PBS finally screened her first feature film, the Guatemalan social documentary When the Mountains Tremble (dubbed "When the Stations Tremble" because of PBS affiliates' initial refusals to air it), it was on the condition that she face on-air grilling from a panel of "experts" on the war. When I was younger, I imagined a certain type of "brave truth teller." One that went into foreign wars full of wry cynicism, willing to face death and break through local hostility to determinedly bring us the whole story. These journos and filmmakers gained access by getting to know the people - smoking cigarettes with them, living with them - all the while sticking to their agenda of finding the truth. Naturally the stories that come out of such circumstances aren't about statistics and conspiracy. They're about the actions of real people in hard times. It's nice to know that, working within the realities of a permanent and lifelong career (with work that has won both Emmy and Academy Awards), people like Yates really do exist.
When the Mountains Tremble, celebrating its twentieth anniversary and finally available on DVD, represents the perfect opportunity to discover Yates's work. Filmed during the height of hostilities in Guatemala, when journalists were largely barred from entering, Yates and co-director Tom Sigel gained intimate access both to the military and the guerillas. The film won a Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival and was co-produced by Yates's longtime collaborator Peter Kinoy. Indigenous rights spokesperson and Nobel Prize laureate Rigoberta Menchu narrates the film and through her painful stories we come to understand the desperation that can lead peaceful people to take up arms against an oppressive government. She and the others around her who chose to speak up exhibit an inspiring bravery, unfortunately brought about by horrific circumstances.
Last year When the Mountains Tremble had its first "official" public screening in Guatemala. The reality is that clandestine tapes have spent all of the years in between circulating in the country, being used extensively as bootleg rallying tools. In a recent development, outtakes and other footage from the film are to be used as evidence in "crimes against humanity" cases involving prominent military figures. It's comforting to know that while most journalists turned away, someone stayed behind to tell the truth.
When you started working on When the Mountains Tremble, you'd been in Central America working on other films including El Salvador: Another Vietnam. How did you end up working in Central America in the first place?
I had been working as a photojournalist in Latin America before I went to college, when I was nineteen. I was always really interested in storytelling and I became interested in visual storytelling as a teenager. I was working at a really small newspaper in a small town in western Massachusetts as a photographer and there was a Puerto Rican migration up the Connecticut River Valley. No one on the newspaper spoke Spanish so I decided to go to Latin America to learn. I took a leave of absence for two months and I stayed for two years. Being around other news people and photographers, I realized how woefully uneducated I was, so I went to university. After university, I came to work in New York City and that's when the wars in Central America were starting. I had studied filmmaking, so I got myself hired on crews that were going to cover the wars in Central America - first the war against Samosa in Nicaragua in the late 70s and the rising insurgency there, and later, in El Salvador. But I was a sound recorder. For many years I had a parallel career as a sound recordist. That was really my apprenticeship. I got to work with a lot of really interesting directors, and I worked on features and commercials, seeing how different directors work up close. Based on my experience in Central America, I decided to make my first feature film, When the Mountains Tremble.
When did you first hear about what was happening in Guatemala?
I was particularly interested in Guatemala because, although I had been working all over the region, I had begun to hear about this Indian insurgency hidden away in the highlands of Guatemala. In the two years previous to going there, seventeen Guatemalan journalists had been killed trying to cover the conflict. Foreign journalists who tried to get into Guatemala were stopped at the airport, interrogated and deported, so I knew it was a war that was [not being] covered. I wanted to find out what was happening, but I knew that the Guatemalan military was really hostile towards the press. Then in 1982, in an effort to reinstate foreign aid - actually military aid from the United States - they decided to have presidential elections to kind of show that this was a free and open society, and they knew they had to allow in the international press corp. That's when I saw our chance and Tom Sigel and I slipped in unnoticed with the rest of the press corp.
The press must have seen and heard about what was really going on. Why did they leave?
They did see. But they were basically covering breaking news, so they covered the elections and then most of them left. And it was just too difficult to go into the highlands. Also, no one would talk to you. No one would talk to me when I first went to Guatemala. It took me a really long time to get people to talk to me.
And how did you get that kind of access?
What I did then and what has really served me well over the last twenty years making really difficult-to-make documentary films is, I always go for the hardest part first; the people who really, really don't want to talk to us. I trained my sights on the military. They wouldn't return my phone calls. When I knocked at their office doors, they slammed them in my face. Nothing. So I went down to the Air Force base in Guatemala City every morning, which is where the helicopters took off for the highlands, and I started to hang out with the soldiers outside smoking cigarettes. Then they introduced me to their sergeant and their sergeant introduced me to his lieutenant and then the lieutenant introduced me to the head of the Guatemalan armed forces, General Benedicto Lucas Garcia. He granted me an interview. In the interview with him, I asked him if I could go with him on a mission into the highlands. He looked at me and he looked at my innocent face, because it was innocent twenty years ago, and he probably thought, "What is this gringita? How is she gonna harm me?" So he let me go with him. On that helicopter mission, our helicopter was actually shot down.
I remember you mentioning that incident in your commentary on When the Mountains Tremble. On that commentary track, you also speak about how last year, when the documentary screened publicly in Guatemala for the first time, you met the guerilla commander who shot you down. How did you manage to find him?
That was really hard. Some of the guerilla commanders are now politicians and one of them was running for President. When I got to Guatemala in November, it was right in the middle of the election season, so I was able to get to him. Also, being the director of When the Mountains Tremble is like having an "all access" pass in Guatemala. I can get to anyone and anyone will talk to me because the film was used so often clandestinely during the years of the war. So he introduced me to his head of security, who had been a guerilla commander in the area where the helicopter was shot down and he figured one of these few people must know something about this. Actually, this goes back a lot further. My husband, Paco de Onis, was working on a National Geographic special in Guatemala and his fixer in Guatemala told him about meeting this guerilla commander and saying to him, "How did you do it? All those years in the mountains, it must have been very frustrating and difficult," and the guerilla commander had told the fixer, "It really was, but sometimes we had really great victories, like when we shot down this helicopter with General Garcia." That was how I knew that this person was findable. As they say, there are no coincidences in life and this was a really good example of that.
In your commentary, you also talk about riding in fire trucks that were making the morning rounds to pick up bodies, as well as many other atrocities that you witnessed. Many of these don't appear in the film. Did you choose to leave them out so that the scenes you did show would have greater emotional impact?
Yes, because I think in a film like this you can really overdo it. I think you have to use incredible restraint to stick to the true spirit of the depth of horror and violence without hammering people over the head with it. Also, I've always believed that if you're making films about social issues, you really have to leave people with a sense of hope. Either during the film or at the end of the film - that things can change, and that everyone has a role to play, however big or small, in that change. That's why I really tried to use restraint.
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