In April 2010 I was invited by documentary filmmaker Pamela Yates (who together with Peter Kinoy and Paco DeOnis forms Skylight Pictures) to join her and her crew in Guatemala to do a series of portraits of the characters from her film GRANITO. The portraits of these inspiring individuals where done in Guatemala City and a small village in the highlands Ilom. GRANITO had it's premiere at the Sundance Filmfestival in January 2011 and has since toured the festival circuit to much critical acclaim.
GRANITO 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 the Guatemala of 1982, then engulfed in a war where a genocidal “scorched earth” campaign by the military exterminated nearly 200,000 Maya people. 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.
