In honor of Native American Heritage month, East Central University will host a screening of Granito: How to Nail a Dictator at 6 p.m. on Saturday, Nov. 1, in the Ataloa Theatre of Hallie Brown Ford Fine Arts Center.
The filmmaker Peter Kinoy will hold a question and answer session following the screening. The screening and question/answer session is free and open to the public.
An official selection of the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, Granito is “inspiring, terrifying, and humbling all at once,” said Karen Fagan, the director of the Institute for Women’s Leadership in Latin America. “Students were moved to tears,” said Francisco Rivera, director of the International Human Rights Clinic at Santa Clara University.
On Nov. 3 from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., Kinoy will lead a master class and make an audio-visual presentation about the stages of storytelling and editing for documentary film. The master class explores the relationship between editing and storytelling. Those who attend will learn about the craft of the edit and the art and ethical choices involved in editing a film about social justice. The presentation will also highlight the increasingly important role of media in our understanding of human rights, social justice and how social change comes about. The class will take place in the Raymond J. Estep Multimedia Center in the Bill S. Cole University Center.
All events are free and open to the public, courtesy of the ECU Foundation, Dr. Tom Cowger and the ECU Native American Studies Program, and the ECU Cultural Activities Committee. Funding for this program is provided in part by a grant from the Oklahoma Humanities Council (OHC) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this program do not necessarily represent those of OHC or NEH.
Granito: How to Nail a Dictator shows how a documentary film from the 1980s helped bring to justice the person responsible for committing genocide against the Maya people during the Guatemalan Civil War. 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 that disappeared. Now, as if a watchful Maya god was weaving back together threads of a story unraveled by the passage of time, the characters in the film each add their own granito, or tiny grain of sand, to the epic tale.
This showing is the sixth in a series of screenings that have been presented by ECU SCREENS this fall. ECU SCREENS is presenting eight productions, including six different Royal National Theater recorded live stage performances, throughout the fall semester. The screenings, which range from classic literary masterpieces to popular contemporary works, are all open to the public.
To learn more about ECU SCREENS and the fall schedule, visit www.ecuscreens.blogspot.com. For more information about Granito, visit http://skylight.is/films/granito/. Dr. Rebecca Nicholson-Weir, co-director of ECU SCREENS, may be contacted at (580) 559-5929 or rnichlsn@ecok.edu.
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