Pamela Yates is the co-founder of Skylight Pictures (1981) — the human rights media organization that combines cinematic arts with the quest for justice to inspire the defense of human rights. Her career as a filmmaker began in war with her first feature, When the Mountains Tremble (1983), made with twenty-two-year-old Rigoberta Menchú, an emerging Maya leader. The film helped put Rigoberta on the world stage and she would go on to win the Nobel Peace Prize a decade later. In the edit room, Rigoberta wrote her story as the story of all her people, a connective thread that ran through the film and set the template for how Pamela has worked ever since: making films with protagonists, not about them, bringing them into editing and distribution, building long-term distribution and impact campaigns together. The film has become a classic of political documentary filmmaking and is widely known in the Latino American diaspora. It remains a calling card of trust in those communities today. Her subsequent films — Takeover (1991), Poverty Outlaw (1997) Presumed Guilty (2002), State of Fear (2005), The Reckoning (2009), Granito: How to Nail a Dictator (2011), 500 Years (2017), and Borderland | The Line Within (2024) — have built on those relationships over forty years. Pamela's 1982 Guatemala footage became key forensic evidence in the General Ríos Montt genocide trial, the first time that the genocide of indigenous peoples in the Americas was prosecuted in a court of law. Her honors include an Academy Award, a Sundance Special Jury Award and 4 nominations for the Sundance Grand Jury Prize, an Emmy Award and several Emmy nominations, the Overseas Press Club Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Poynter Fellowship in Journalism at Yale University and the Inaugural Art of Activism Award from the Woodstock Film Festival. She is currently in production on The Truth Tellers.
