8, 2021.Ĭhristiane Amanpour, Maria Ressa & Ramona Diaz in Conversation About “A Thousand Cuts”: broadcast premiere on FRONTLINE (PBS) Friday, Jan.
In the wake of the debut of “A Thousand Cuts” at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, The New York Times called it “absorbing” (Critic’s Pick) The Washington Post said it is “utterly urgent” and The Hollywood Reporter described it as “essential.” The documentary has its U.S. What happens to democracy when press freedom is threatened and disinformation flourishes on social media? In “A Thousand Cuts,” award-winning filmmaker Ramona Diaz tells the story of President Duterte’s crackdown on the press, his pursuit of Ressa and her colleagues, the role of online disinformation, and the implications for democracy. This journalism is made possible by viewers like you. This modesty and relatability makes her somewhat un-hagiographable, not that Diaz would have been likely to go the fawning route: Her previous Sundance-awarded film “Motherland,” set in an overworked Filipino maternity ward, revealed an intelligence coupled to intense compassion that suggests she and Ressa are kindred spirits.How prominent journalist Maria Ressa became a prime target of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on the press. She may be packing to go receive an award from some august international body, but she gets annoyed with herself when she closes up her suitcase only to find a shampoo bottle she forgot to put inside it. Her greatest asset may just be her approachability, her endearing habit of swatting away compliments and making faces when someone suggests she’s extraordinary.
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Diaz assembles her wealth of material cleverly, skipping between Ressa and dela Rosa between eye-opening interviews with Rappler journalists and archive footage of Duterte individually targeting rising Rappler star Pia Ranada between a female opposition politician standing for election and Duterte’s chief women lieutenants - his daughter Sara, now a mayor, and pop-star blogger “Mocha” Uson, who serves in his administration and has been nicknamed the “Queen of Fake News.”ĭespite all of these supporting characters, and the spreading shadow of Duterte himself, whose oddly avuncular energy is so wildly at odds with the violence, corruption and hatefulness he preaches, it is Ressa who emerges most vividly from “A Thousand Cuts.” Petite, bespectacled, with close-cropped black hair and a very funny reaction when a friend tries to make her wear a slinky evening dress to a fancy event, Ressa exudes a down-to-earth best-friendliness, if your bestie had a genius IQ and was on first-name terms with Amal and George (indeed Amal Clooney is part of Ressa’s defense counsel).
Under Sam Lipman’s lightly intriguing, noodling score, nighttime cityscapes give Manila the seedy buzz of a dystopian sci-fi, and even the talking-head interviews have a certain nervy, noirish sheen. The intimidation they face is no hollow threat: as Diaz’s film makes clear, Duterte’s officials - here exemplified by Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa, his bald, baby-faced Mussolini-like lieutenant, to whom Diaz also gains surprisingly frank access - have been responsible for literally thousands of extrajudicial murders under the flimsy guise of the “war on drugs.”įor a category of filmmaking where the craft is often utilitarian at best, the footage is unusually well-shot by DPs Gabriel Goodenough and Jeffrey Johnson.
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In the years since, Rappler and its journalists (many of whom are women, which takes on special significance when you consider the regime’s gleeful, violent misogynistic rhetoric) have become specific targets of Duterte’s ire, even as Ressa has become increasingly celebrated overseas as a champion of free speech and a shining example of journalistic integrity. Ressa, along with three other female journalists, runs Rappler, an online news portal she co-founded in 2012 that soon became the staunchest debunker of the misinformation and “fake news” that helped Filipino strongman Rodrigo Duterte gain power in 2016.
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