The Human Rights and Global Justice Working Group 3rd Annual Film Series on Global Justice: Granito - How to Nail a Dictator

Tuesday, April 3, 2012 4:30 PM to 7:00 PM EDT
Research Hall, 163

Synopsis:

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.

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This year’s film series is a sequel to the Human Rights and Global Justice Working Group’s two successful previous festivals in 2010 and 2011. The film series offers a variety of cinematic representations of these varying responses to human rights violations and injustice, and each screening will be followed by a discussion period.

Our hope is that the film series will initiate a campus-wide debate within the Mason community about the challenges of global justice not only in far-away places such as El Salvador and Burma, but at home as well.

The key objective of the film series is to promote discussion among Mason students and faculty about diverse ways people and movements around the world respond to atrocity and injustice around the world. The film series showcases cutting-edge feature films as well as documentary films (see list along with screening dates and times below) that explore a wide variety of issues, from the courageous Burmese political prisoners telling their life stories under an oppressive military regime to the impact of drug trafficking on poor rural Mexican communities.

Each screening will be followed by a Q&A session led by an associate faculty member. Additionally, some events will feature filmmakers and/or invited guest speakers sharing their experiences and introducing their work.

The film series is the result of a collaboration among Mason faculty members across a variety of disciplines who have collaborated since 2007 in the Human Rights & Global Justice Working Group (formerly the Transitional and Transnational Working Group at the Center for Global Studies) to study and research different mechanisms of coping with past mass violence and injustice.

 

Sponsored by Center for Global Studies Human Rights and Global Justice Working Group with support from the Latin American Studies Program and the Global Affairs Program at GMU.

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