Event banner for The Truth Tellers, with a still from Borderland of a girl waving in front of the border wall, the date, time, place and registration details, and the panel with affiliations
If you live in the NYC region, please join me for what promises to be an evening of creative resilience brought to you by an interdisciplinary assembly of filmmakers, academics, reporters, and advocates. The evening centers on a topic that is close to the heart of my own work: community-led transparency and accountability. At a time when federal immigration officers are hiding their faces, deleting their text messages, and lying in court, people across this country are coming together to reveal what’s going on and creating an historical record.
A new documentary by Pamela Yates and longtime partner Paco de Onís, The Truth Tellers, follows communities that are gathering testimony and preserving evidence of how immigrants are being treated now, in the hope that it may support accountability later. Pamela Yates knows about the power of film. Footage she shot in Guatemala in the early 1980s later served as evidence in the genocide case against former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt, a story she told in her 2011 film Granito: How to Nail a Dictator.
The Truth Tellers continues the social justice tradition of Skylight, the New York documentary company founded by Pamela and Paco that’s behind When the Mountains Tremble, Granito, 500 Years and, more recently, Borderland: The Line Within. At a moment of extraordinary immigration enforcement and expanding detention across the United States, the film asks: what does it mean to document what is happening now—not only for today’s public understanding, but for the historical record and the possibility of future accountability?