Described by director Ramona S. Diaz as a film about “the erosion of democracy, and one woman’s story to hold power to account,” “A Thousand Cuts” examines social media disinformation campaigns and the current crackdown on the news media in the Philippines by President Rodrigo Duterte. The documentary spotlights one of the politician’s top targets, journalist and TIME Magazine’s Person of the Year Maria Ressa.
“Is it important that people be afraid of you?” Ressa asks Duterte in a new trailer for the film. He responds with an emphatic “yes.”
“It started with the drug war,” Ressa explains in the spot. We see footage of Duterte warning citizens, “Do not do drugs — because I will kill you.”
As founder and chief executive of the independent news site Rappler, Ressa tried to hold Duterte and his government accountable for their violent war on drugs and its escalating body count.
“You are a fake news outlet,” Duterte tells a reporter at a press conference. “You will be allowed to criticize us, but you’ll go to jail for your crimes.”
Averaging 90 hate messages an hour, Ressa began to feel like she couldn’t trust the police to protect her. And then she got arrested.
“I’ve built a career making films about the Filipino and Filipino-American experience. When I was finishing my last film, ‘Motherland,’ I started seeing extremely disturbing photographs of President Duterte’s war on drugs on my Facebook page. I couldn’t turn away even if I had wanted to,” Diaz told us. “As a documentary filmmaker, I knew I needed to do something — at the very least, go on a research trip to Manila. One thing led to another, and about a year-and-a-half later, in mid-2018, I was in the Philippines conducting research, formulating the questions that needed to be asked, and looking for my story. All the themes that I’ve explored in my previous films were present in this story: power and disempowerment, and how power is harnessed by charismatic individuals in the name of the people.”
Diaz emphasized that she hopes “A Thousand Cuts” helps viewers realize “that fundamental rights we take for granted can be taken away without much resistance — with no drama at all, if we’re not vigilant.”
“A Thousand Cuts” made its world premiere at Sundance in January and opens in theaters and virtual cinemas August 7. The doc will air on PBS in January 2021.
