Borderland | The Line Within – February 19th
Film at 7:00pm; Wednesday, February 19th.
Borderland | The Line Within will be shown for free at Amherst Cinema. Tickets are available at the box office on a first come, first serve basis.
Borderland | The Line Within
(2024, Pamela Yates, United States and Mexico, 110min, in English & Spanish w/ English subtitles)
The United States border is not just a geographic location. The border is everywhere. It lies within every undocumented immigrant family with the threat that at any moment they can be captured, incarcerated, deported; their lives destroyed. Borderland l The Line Within not only exposes the profitable business of immigration and its human cost, but weaves together the stories of immigrant heroines and heroes resisting and showing a way forward, intent on building a movement in the shadow of the border industrial complex, recognizing the human rights of all.
Film Screening
Wednesday, February 19th
Free and open to the public
Introduced by Kevin A. Young (Associate Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst)
Co-Sponsored by:
Director Pamela Yates, and Producer Paco de Onís will be Present for the Introduction and the Q&A after the Screening
Pamela Yates
Documentary Filmmaker and Human Rights Activist
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Pamela Yates is an award-winning film director and the co-founder of Skylight, a not-for-profit media organization that for over 40 years has combined cinematic arts with the quest for justice to inspire the defense of human rights. Skylight’s films and programs strengthen social justice movements and catalyze collaborative networks of artists and activists. She is the Director of the Sundance Special Jury award winning When the Mountains Tremble; the Executive Producer of the Academy Award winning Witness to War; and the Director of State of Fear: The Truth About Terrorism, which has been translated into 47 languages and broadcast in 154 countries. It was awarded the Overseas Press Award for Best Reporting in Any Medium about Latin America. Her film Granito: How to Nail a Dictator, for which she awarded a Guggenheim fellowship, was used as key forensic evidence in the genocide trial against Efraín Ríos Montt in Guatemala. Her third film in the Guatemalan trilogy, 500 YEARS had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, was broadcast on POV/PBS, streamed as part of Amazon Prime Festival Stars and is currently in wide release. Her feature length documentary BORDERLAND | The Line Within, about the war against immigrants in the U.S., is currently touring in cinemas across the country and in Latin American, as well as streaming. For her work on BORDERLAND, Pamela received the Poynter Fellowship in Journalism from Yale University. She was awarded the inaugural Art of Activism Award, along with Paco de Onís, by the Woodstock Film Festival in 2024. Pamela is a member of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, Writers Guild of America, and the International Documentary Association and is on the Advisory Board of the Woodstock Film Festival.
Paco de Onís
Documentary Film Producer
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Paco grew up in several Latin American countries during periods of dictatorships. He is the Executive Director and Executive Producer of Skylight, a human rights media organization dedicated to advancing social justice through storytelling by creating documentary films and media tools that can applied in long-term strategies for positive social change.
Paco co-created SolidariLabs, a program designed to disseminate Skylight’s innovative model for creating human rights media ecosystems in conjunction with committed media makers, artists, technologists and movement organizations, with the aim of building enduring networks of 21st century human rights defenders. One of the promising initiatives that has emerged from the SolidariLabs network is the Virtual International Volunteers Xchange, VIVX, an app and online platform designed to connect volunteers who will virtually accompany human rights defenders under threat, to support the accompaniment work already being done on the ground by organizations such as Peace Brigades International, with whom Skylight will partner.
Paco’s film producing credits include 500 YEARS, Granito: How to Nail a Dictator, Rebel Citizen, Disruption, State of Fear, and The Reckoning and he is now producing a new project titled Borderlands on immigration justice in the United States. The project highlights powerful stories of “righteous persons” who are motivated by moral conviction and compassion that show how courageous actions can lead to mobilization and the defense of human rights in the face of hate and discrimination.
Kevin A. Young
Associate Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst
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Professor Young’s research and teaching interests are in social movements, revolution, labor, political economy, and imperialism in modern Latin America and the United States. His most recent book is Abolishing Fossil Fuels: Lessons from Movements That Won (PM Press, 2024). The book analyzes the power of the fossil fuel industry, how the climate and Indigenous movements have chipped away at it, and how other mass movements throughout U.S. history have defeated capitalists. His other books include Blood of the Earth: Resource Nationalism, Revolution, and Empire in Bolivia (2017), the edited volume Making the Revolution: Histories of the Latin American Left (2019), the coauthored book Levers of Power: How the 1% Rules and What the 99% Can Do About It (2020), and the coedited volume Trump and the Deeper Crisis (2022). Current research interests include revolutionary mobilization in El Salvador in the 1970s, the U.S.-Central America solidarity movement of the 1970s–90s, peasant politics in mid-twentieth-century Bolivia, and recent US climate politics.
Trailer