Written and directed by Ramona S. Diaz
Featuring Maria Ressa, President Rodrigo Duterte, and Pia Ranada
Running time: 1 hour and 50 minutes

by Jaime Davis, The Fixer

“What do you do when the president lies?”

This is a question Filipino-American journalist (and one of Time magazine’s people of the year 2018) Maria Ressa wrestles with as head of Filipino independent news site Rappler, as she regularly battles Rodrigo Duterte, president of the Philippines, as he denounces the site as “fake news,” likens Ressa to a common criminal, repeatedly threatens to shut down the site, and taunts Rappler reporters with menacing threats (“If you end up dead it’s your fault.”) Despite this opposition, Ressa and her team work tirelessly to preserve free press and democracy as much as they can, uncovering injustices, conspiracies, and disinformation networks that pervade Filipino social media. Ressa, a Filipino-American partially raised in Toms River, NJ, endures regular and horrific cyberbullying, receiving numerous daily death threats and calls for her rape and imprisonment. She’s been arrested multiple times, all for telling the truth. She can’t trust the police to protect her so she employs her own security detail, ushering her from home to office and back each day.

While Ressa is a national target, life in the Philippines can be a violent place for those on the margins, as Rappler journalists recount in a new documentary, A Thousand Cuts, by director Ramona S. Diaz (Imelda). Upon the very first day of his presidency in 2016, Duterte kicked off a brutal, inhumane war on the poor and marginalized masked as a war on drugs and criminality. His tag line? “If you’re caught with drugs, I will kill you.” He doesn’t mean the kind of “kill” your parents pretended when they caught you fucking up. No, he means literally end your life. While official government tallies put the number of drug-related deaths around 5,000, human rights advocates claim the number of casualties under Duterte’s war on crime is closer to 25,000. Prior to being elected president, he served as mayor of Davao City where he was linked to vigilante squad-style killings of 1,400 alleged criminals and street children. He’s been known to make jokes about his penis and the smell of a woman’s vagina at official speaking events, isn’t above making light of rape, and enjoys the regular spreading of disinformation on social media. Sound familiar?

It is precisely these similarities between Duterte and President Trump that make A Thousand Cuts so completely chilling and pressing. As populist leaders helm the US, the Philippines, Brazil, India, Indonesia and the UK, we’re seeing a dangerous spike in autocratic leadership across the world. Just in the past few weeks, Trump has touted the possibility of postponing the presidential election, suggested he retain power for decades to come, instituted an executive order banning use of certain apps in the US, shared a video that made false claims about the coronavirus on Facebook and Twitter, rescinded the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule under the Fair Housing Act (a blatant appeal to racist white suburban American voters), and ordered federal strikes upon peaceful protesters in Portland. He is dangerously and decidedly dividing our nation using anger and hate to create a culture of fear. This is how he wins.

With everything we’re dealing with in the US right now, a fight for democracy as we slowly slip-slide more and more into Trump’s authoritarian regime, the coronavirus pummeling our health and morale and economy at every turn, why should we care about what’s happening in the Philippines? Ressa brings up this very point midway through the film. Filipinos spend the most time on the internet - approximately 10 hours per day; globally, they spend more time on social media. Ressa and her team started closely inspecting the disinformation campaigns that silently seep into our Facebook and Twitter feeds, the same disinformation campaigns that upended our 2016 election. With one particular false news story, Ressa’s team isolated the source of one particular lie to find 26 fake accounts, all of which were following only each other, that ended up influencing 3 million other accounts. This is how it works: first the lies build distrust in institutions, then slowly the way people think, and it snowballs from there. In addition to their research on how disinformation is sourced and spread, they learned that Cambridge Analytica (yes, that Cambridge Analytica), in preparation for their involvement in America’s 2016 election, tested many of their tactics on those in the Philippines. Ressa summarizes for us in the film, “Technology helps make facts disputable.”

A Thousand Cuts is a must-watch film not only for it’s timely warnings of the continued need for truth in social media and journalism and pro-democracy stance, but also for it’s taut look at bravery in the face of fascism. It is incredibly well-constructed, well-researched, and impeccably lensed. By its close, we watch as Ressa is convicted in June 2020 of cyber libel, awaiting sentencing. She faces up to six years in prison. As the film warns, what’s happening in the US happens to the rest of the world. If nothing is done, journalism and democracy cease to exist. As Ressa says, “If you don’t use your rights, you lose them.”

One of the saddest moments in the film (and there are many) comes at the end as a Rappler journalist, defeated, admits they’re “enjoying the last days of democracy.” We can’t let this be the end of democracy as we know it. Don’t be afraid. Fear is what they want. Apathy is the enemy.

A Thousand Cuts is currently available via virtual screening rooms listed on the film’s website.

Visit trialwatch.org for more on how to help promote and protect the voices of those speaking up in their countries.