Kevin Pina

After several trips to Central America during the late 70s, Pina came to the attention of Latin American filmmakers Diego de la Texera and Tete Vasconsuellos who asked him to represent them on a US national tour in 1980 of their feature length documentary El Salvador: El Pueblo Vencera! (El Salvador: The People Will Win!). Pina produced his first documentary project entitled El Salvador: In the Name of Democracy; chronicling the U.S-sponsored elections of 1982 from two different perspectives. Pina worked with Salvadoran filmmakers and foreign journalists that would film events related to the elections from the perspectives of the U.S.-sponsored Salvadoran military and the Salvadoran guerillas of the FMLN. Pina raised the $80,000 budget by holding innumerable fundraisers/screenings in Hollywood with help from friends like the late Ed Asner, the late James Garner, Diane Ladd and Mike Ferrell. The film premiered in its entirety in 1984 on KTVU in the San Francisco Bay Area and also aired on PBS culminating in a presentation to a full house of U.S. representatives and their aides in the Congressional Screening Room in Washington D.C that same year. Pina returned to Nicaragua in early 1985 as a consultant with a Sandinista community radio project collaborating with Radio Farabundo Marti and to participate in the founding of the El Salvador Film Institute (ICES), an organization of media workers drawn from the ranks of the FMLN and international filmmakers who served as mentors and collaborators. Pina was hired in 1989 as the Associate Producer/fundraiser by Mark Kitchell the producer/director of the documentary Berkeley in the Sixties. Through contacts he developed including Berkeley alumnus and then Chairman of International Creative Management (ICM), Jeff Berg, Pina eventually brought Berkeley in the Sixties to the attention of producers Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall. Berkeley in the Sixties was nominated for an Oscar for Best Documentary Film in 1990. Pina's work on Berkeley in the Sixties earned him a reputation as a fixer in the documentary community in the S.F. Bay Area. Glenn Switkes and Monte Aguirre hired Pina in 1991 to bring their stalled project Amazonia: Voices from the Rainforest to completion. As Associate Producer he raised $90,000 and reorganized editing for the project which was to become a benchmark film on the subject of the Amazon rain forest and a primary organizing tool of the Rainforest Action Network (RAN). Pina's first Haiti documentary, Haiti: Harvest of Hope was released in early 1995 and focused on the formation of Aristide's Lavalas political movement, the military coup of 1991 and Aristide's eventual return from exile in October 1994. The Haitian Kreyol version Rekolte Lespwa was narrated by Haitian poet Jean-Claude Martineau and premiered in Haiti on Haitian Mother's Day in May 1995. The English version narrated by the actor Roscoe Lee Brown was released for wider distribution in the U.S. in 1997. After Haiti: Harvest of Hope, Pina released a second video entitled Haiti: The UNtold Story. The film chronicles human rights abuses by the Haitian police and a military assault on July 6, 2005 by United Nations forces where residents accuse them of massacring civilians in the impoverished neighborhood of Cité Soleil. Haiti: The UNtold Story was an earlier version of Pina's latest documentary, Haiti: We must kill the Bandits, subsequently re-edited for a final release and premiere in 2009 at the Bahamas International Film Festival. Although Haiti: We must kill the Bandits recycles rare footage from Pina's earlier documentary Haiti: Harvest of Hope for context, most of the video is original footage shot between 2004-2006. Pina is in the rights clearance phase of his latest project #OO: Occupy Oakland following the local movement that grew to challenge the status quo by marshaling the traditional progressive forces of the left including Oakland's historical movements by uniting peace, labor and civil rights activists. Oakland's unique history, including the early struggles of the Black Panthers against police violence in the black community, was the backdrop to the more contemporaneous movement that sought justice following the murder of Oscar Grant by a BART police officer on January 1, 2009. The film shows how many of the same activists from the Oscar Grant movement took up the banner of the Occupy Wall Street movement helping to give rise to Occupy Oakland. As a result, Occupy Oakland, foreshadowed the Black Lives Matter movement through its unflinching linkage of income equality with police brutality in the black community, not only in Oakland, but in cities across the United States. The documentary #OO (Occupy Oakland) represents Pina's continuing efforts to retell this history in video and to preserve it for generations to come.