The day of The Reckoning
by paco on 19 Jan 2009 | Comments
We have finally arrived at the big day of the World Premiere of “The Reckoning: The Battle for the International Criminal Court” at the Sundance 09 Film Festival, the first time we will see the film with an audience - very exciting, to say the least! It’s been a long journey - the seed for the film was planted in May of 2002 when we spoke to Eduardo Gonzalez up in the high Andes while researching our previous film, “State of Fear: The Truth About Terrorism”, based on the work of the Peruvian Truth & Reconciliation Commission (PTRC). Eduardo, who is now Americas Deputy Director for the ICTJ, at the time was working with the PTRC as they traveled around the Andes holding public hearings to unearth the narrative of Peru’s 20-year “war on terror” against Shining Path and the nation’s subsequent descent into a democracy where civil liberties and the rule of law were gutted in the name of vanquishing terrorism. One morning at breakfast in our hotel in Huancavelica, a regional capital that had been devastated during the conflict, I asked Eduardo what he had done before working for the PTRC, and he told me that he had been working with the Coalition for the International Criminal Court (CICC), an umbrella organization for 2,500 NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations) and civil society groups around the world that had been leading the charge of the movement to create an International Criminal Court. The idea of this court created to prosecute perpetrators of crimes against humanity, no matter how powerful, so intrigued me that I shared it with my fellow filmmakers Pamela Yates and Peter Kinoy, and we decided to explore the possibility of making a film about it.
Even as we made and released State of Fear, we were laying the groundwork for The Reckoning. In the founding treaty of the ICC, the Rome Statute, it had been determined that 60 countries had to ratify the treaty in order to trigger the establishment of the Court. This happened in April of 2002, a couple of weeks before my conversation with Eduardo, and in July of 2003 the Court came into being, with Luis Moreno Ocampo as its first Prosecutor. By May of 2006 we had enough funding in place to start production, and we’ve spent the past 3 years filming on 4 continents and editing in our studio in New York. And now here we are! More later - we’re off to the premiere!
