Cause for Murder

RELEASED: SEP 1, 2002
The murders of two outspoken human rights defenders spotlight the difficulty of change in modern Mexico.

Cause for Murder is a collaboration which pairs New York Times bureau chief Ginger Thompson with independent filmmakers Pamela Yates and Peter Kinoy. The show paints a rich and complex portrait of modern Mexico with characters from the top to bottom of Mexican society: President Fox, family members, investigators, State Prosecutors, co-workers, reporters, and peasants.

“Within the past year in Mexico two young women lawyers were gunned down. Both women, from opposite ends of Mexican society, were working to end corruption and bring about rule of law.”

Digna Ochoa was a lawyer from a peasant background who became recognized in her own country and internationally as a fearless defender of human rights. She took on difficult and controversial cases and was discovered shot to death in her office.

Marigeli Tames was the talented daughter of an affluent Mexican middle-class family. At 27 she was already a City Councilwoman and was becoming a political player in Fox’s PAN Party. She was shot through the heart on the eve of exposing citywide corruption within Fox’s own political party. How these two women lived and died, and how the Fox administration is pursuing justice in their cases reveals much about the possibilities of change in Mexico.
In 2000, Vicente Fox was elected President of Mexico, ending 71 years of single party rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI. Fox was swept into office promising to bring “el cambio,” the change, to Mexico.
This change would attack corruption and injustice at every level of Mexican society. It was this very injustice that shaped the lives and deaths of Digna Ochoa and Marigeli Tames.

Marigeli’s fierce drive and commitment to the anti-corruption ideals of her PAN party led her to become City Councilwoman of Atizapan, a huge suburb of Mexico City. But to her shock and dismay she uncovered a citywide web of corruption controlled by the Mayor of Atizapan, a member of her own PAN Party. Before she could bring legal proceeding against the PAN mayor she was assassinated.

Digna Ochoa was a small woman who was pit-bull like in her defense of the poor and powerless. In what would become one of her final case she was defending two peasants who were fighting to keep illegal loggers out of their mountains. The story reveals impoverished farmers caught between the powerful forces of local strongmen, a US-based International Corporation, and the Mexican Army. Digna brought the case to national attention and exposed human rights abuses by the Mexican Army. In October 2001, after numerous threats, she was found shot to death in her small law office.
Cause for Murder uses the lives and deaths of these two courageous women to help the audience evaluate the reality of “el cambio”, Fox’s promise of a new tomorrow for Mexico.

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Battle For Broad

RELEASED: JUL 14, 2000
Poverty activists challenge police at the Republican National Convention.

Outriders

RELEASED: JUL 14, 1999
Poor and homeless families on a cross-country odyssey to expose poverty in America.

In June 1998, 50 people, mostly women and children, all poor, some homeless, boarded a bus in Philadelphia. They are members of the Kensington Welfare Rights Union — an organization composed of and guided by poor and homeless people — embarking on an odyssey to meet America. For a month they crisscross the country, gathering stories from people who, like themselves, have been cut off welfare or downsized from their jobs. Outriders is the human story of the riders on the New Freedom Bus and the remarkable people they meet.

This third film in the “Poverty in America” trilogy premiered at the International Peace Conference at the Hague, May, 1999. Broadcast on PBS in 2000. Since then it has been used by hundreds of activists and educators around the country.

Brotherhood of Hate

RELEASED: MAR 1, 1999
The story of one family that tried to raise their eight sons to be “white warriors.”

When Arkansas Deputy Sheriff Aaron Duvall was assigned to investigate what appeared to be an isolated triple homicide outside rural Russellville, he became obsessed with finding the killers of the family that he knew, including William Mueller, his wife Nancy and their 8-yearold daughter Sarah. BROTHERHOOD OF HATE recounts Duvall’s investigation of the Mueller murder case, which gradually expanded to reveal a nationwide pattern of violence linked to a white supremacy group. The investigative trail leads to the Kehoe family in Coleville, Washington, in particular the oldest son Chevie, who conspired to build a whitesonly homeland in the Pacific Northwest. The film reveals how his efforts led to a countrywide rampage of theft, gunfights with police and murder. BROTHERHOOD OF HATE thus documents one family’s legacy of hate, relating the story of eight brothers raised to be white supremacist warriors, and in the process reveals the dangers posed to America by the virulent, racist ideology of white supremacy

2001 Amnesty International Human Rights Film Festival
Salt Lake City 2001 Seattle Human Rights Film Festival

Poverty Outlaw

RELEASED: JAN 1, 1997

Teen Dreams

RELEASED: JUL 14, 1994
Three teens shoot their autobiographies in this pioneering work.

No More Disguises

RELEASED: MAR 1, 1989
The first music video to come out of China amidst the aborted democracy movement.

We’re Not Gonna Take It

RELEASED: DEC 14, 1980
Historic strike of the Hormel meatpackers Local P-9.