“Very Much Like Short Cuts, and the Medfly was Duterte — That Was My Pitch”: Ramona S. Diaz on A Thousand Cuts

While recent right-wing attacks on the free press here in the US have rightly been sounding alarm bells, in a global context they are merely wake-up calls. Sure, Trump deeming the “lamestream” media “fake news” is dangerously juvenile, but it’s also a far cry from, say, the Duterte administration finding the founder and CEO of the Philippines’s top online news site Rappler guilty of “cyber libel” — a travesty of justice that happened just this past June. And the politically orchestrated verdict comes with both a hefty fine and potential prison time for “2018 Time Person of the Year” Maria Ressa along with a former colleague.

Though it’s not hard to see why Ressa, a superhumanly dogged journalistic force (with a default mode set to unbridled optimism), might get under a murderous strongman’s skin. What’s less immediately apparent is how Ressa has even managed to survive for this long within a system determined to sentence dissent to death by “a thousand cuts,” as the title of award-winning director Ramona S. Diaz’s latest documentary suggests.

Fortunately, Diaz, a Filipino-American filmmaker, has been a longtime observer of the complicated country and its culture — from 2004’s Imelda to 2017’s Motherland — so she’s able to shine a big-picture light on both Ressa and the wider context that her team of investigative journalists are forced to operate in. Indeed, A Thousand Cuts goes beyond providing an intimate journey alongside Ressa and her heroic Rappler reporters as they relentlessly battle to expose Duterte’s corrupt war on drugs for the war on poor drug addicts that it actually is (even while they themselves serve as targets of the government’s highly effective, social media disinformation campaign). Smartly, Diaz also turns her lens to the politically savvy, pro-Duterte side, by tagging along as government secretary Mocha Uson, a onetime pop star, and General Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa, a retired Police General, spread a message of intolerance and hate — online and on the stump — in the most upbeat, crowd-pleasing ways. Which renders the dark side even darker.

So to learn more about documenting the heart of Duterte’s Philippines, and what her lead character’s recent guilty verdict means for both Ressa and the future of Diaz’s filmmaking there, Filmmaker reached out to the director a few days prior to the August 7th virtual release of A Thousand Cuts (through PBS Distribution and Frontline).

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.