My old friends Pam Yates and Paco de Onis own Skylight Pictures.
They have been documentary filmmakers for years. Real documentary filmmakers. Pam won the Academy Award for Documentaries a few years ago for her film about Guatemala.
Now they are about to release The Reckoning. They’ve been working on it for the past two years. They just got accepted at Sundance.
While I love them and think they are brilliant filmmakers, what I found really interesting was their most recent use of filpcams for their last film, State of Fear.
State of Fear is about Peru under Fujimori. What makes it particularly interesting was that they just re-released the film in Quechua, the native language of the Indian peoples of Peru.
You don’t get all that many films about Peruvian dictators in Quechua.
What makes this really interesting, is that after releasing the Quechua version, and screening it in villages across Peru, Paco and Pam gave out a few hundred flipcams to the Quechua Indians, taught them to use them, and then set up a website where they could post their comments on the film.
You can see the results here.
A fantastic 3-dimensional foray into new media and the web, driven by outstanding fimmaking.
Congrats. Great great job.
