In one memorable speech, he belittles his enemies by detailing the fullness and frequency of his erections. As she exposes the assorted hypocrisies and cruelties of Duterte’s administration, he constantly defames her as a liar, and that’s one of his less-personal epithets. Ressa stands tall as one of his most vocal critics, her every article incurring harsher recriminations from the government. Her film begins with the savage mass executions perpetrated by Duterte’s officers under the guise of a drug war, and only grows more chilling as he mounts an offensive to justify them. Having successfully embedded her production on both sides of the issue, Diaz had a bird’s-eye view of a full-scale democratic breakdown. Maria Ressa and Ramona S Diaz attend the premiere of A Thousand Cuts during the 2020 Sundance film festival. They think they have the powers of persuasion, that by the end of the process, you’ll see it how they see it.” I think they both said yes so they could be part of shaping that story. Mocha’s very media-conscious, she understood the power of story. “Getting the participation of Duterte supporters really came down to people always seeing themselves as the hero of their own story. “I wanted to have a large ensemble, you know, Robert Altmanesque,” Diaz says. Her film spends a goodly amount of time with such tertiary figures as Duterte’s right-hand enforcer Bato and the so-called “queen of fake news” Mocha Uson, both of whom saw their participation as an opportunity to leverage their public profile to their advantage. She received special permissions exceeding those of Filipino press, with approval coming back even before Rappler had gotten on board. ![]() (“Ramona came in, we knew we couldn’t document this ourselves, and I didn’t want to have to pay for it,” Ressa laughs.) For Diaz, gaining entry to Duterte’s inner circle proved much simpler. You passed the test!”įollowing what Diaz describes as “a long negotiation”, Ressa allowed the camera crew a rare degree of access to Rappler’s inner operations as well as her own home life. ![]() “If Ramona had denied that moment from 2004 when she came back to meet with me, I don’t think I’d have let her in! That was a good call, confronting it. Why she gave me permission is a question for her.” Fourteen years later, I’m in her office asking for permission and hoping she doesn’t remember. “But someone warned me, ‘She actually doesn’t really like the film.’ I said, ‘Then I don’t want to talk to her!’ I wanted to discuss the case, but I didn’t want to litigate my film. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, Maria Ressa wants to talk to me!’” Diaz remembers. Diaz’s distributor had set up a handful of interviews while she was in the Philippines defending herself, one of which was with a pre-Rappler Ressa, then the face of CNN in south-east Asia. Diaz had just completed her debut feature, an Imelda Marcos documentary that led the former first lady and political heavyweight to sue over her depiction. ![]() The two women share a friendly, warm dynamic that began under more tepid terms back in 2004. You’d probably start to see yourself as a tragic hero of Grecian legend, too.Īs Ressa and Diaz congenially crack each other up via videochat, however, they hardly seem like our final line of defense against the encroaching spread of fascism. Ramona S Diaz’s new documentary A Thousand Cuts captures this unfolding conflict as Duterte ramps up his opposition and files cyber-libel charges against Ressa, one in a handful of lawsuits that could place her in prison for up to an entire century. As the co-founder and CEO of the Filipino news outlet Rappler, she’s been one of the major bulwarks against his brutal regime, reporting on the extrajudicial killings and aggressive misinformation campaigns in spite of state-sponsored intimidation to the point of open threats. In the time since Rodrigo Duterte was elected president of the Philippines in 2016, Ressa has found herself locked in a good-and-evil struggle of Campbellian proportions.
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