Mark Reviews Movies: A THOUSAND CUTS

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 6, 2020

"First they came for the journalists. We don't know what happened after that."
- A protest sign

They are going after journalists in the Philippines. Maria Ressa, a journalist who runs a news website that has investigated and been rightly critical of President Rodrigo Duterte, is the prime target. A Thousand Cuts, director Ramona S. Diaz's documentary about Ressa and the political situation in that Southeast Asian country, does not paint an optimistic portrait of the future of democracy in the Philippines. By the end, Duterte has consolidated power with sympathizers, lackeys, and even a close family member at various levels of government.

How did they get to this place, and why does it matter? Those are the central questions of Diaz's film, and while they answers are vital and terrifying on the face of matters, the means by which she arrives at them only amplify how disastrous things have become, are becoming, and likely will become in the Philippines. Given the political leanings of Duterte and his allies and the circumstances of their rise to power, this film isn't just an account of how quickly and fully a democracy can reach the verge of collapse. It's a warning for the rest of the world, too.

Ressa may be the central focus here (and justifiably so), but Duterte himself is the instigator of this situation. We see the journalist, the co-founder and editor-in-chief of an independent news website called Rappler, interviewing the politician in the months leading up to his eventual election to the presidency. The mayor of the largest and one of the most populous cities in the Philippines at the time, Duterte's way with words is succinct, his tone cold, and his ideas horrific.

Ressa asks if his rhetoric about a proposed national war on drugs is authentic. He has said that he would kill addicts and dealers as mayor of Davao City. Additionally, his plan would expand upon being elected as the head of state and government in the country. Of course, he is sincere, Duterte asserts, with chilling matter-of-factness. After a short beat—as if he's counting in his head—and with that same tone, he adds that, since becoming mayor, he has killed three people.

The film jumps ahead to Duterte's inauguration as president in 2016, after a decisive electoral victory. Within three hours of the ceremony, the country's "war on drugs" would have its first victim. A man was shot and killed in the streets. From then until even now, the so-called war is ongoing. Thousands have been killed in police action, and maybe five times more than that have been killed in total.

Duterte didn't just order the police to become judge and executioner of suspected addicts and dealer. During political rallies marked by "enemy"-naming and the odd mood of watching a man doing a stand-up routine (Why does that sound familiar?), he directly encouraged, even after his election, ordinary people to become vigilante killers. They did, and a lot of people in the country, who have suffered from poverty and a flood of illegal drug usage, approve of all of this.

That's the setup, established clearly and absolutely, of the rest of the film. It follows Ressa, as she fights legal intimidation orchestrated by Duterte and travels the world to shine a light on the president's abuses of power. It looks at various reporters for Rappler, who are engaged in their own legal battles (being barred from access to press conferences at the presidential palace), because Duterte takes the circulation of the facts of his crimes as a personal offense, and their struggles to cover extrajudicial killings happening on the streets every day.

The documentary, filmed during the campaign for the 2019 Philippine Senate election, even tracks the political ambitions of two of Duterte's most ardent supporters: Mocha Uson, a singer who started a popular and insidious propaganda blog for her beloved president, and Ronald "Bato" dela Rosa, the chief of the country's national police who echoes Duterte's desire to see every drug addict and dealer killed. Watching these two campaign, with crowds of people from an impoverished neighborhood lining up along the street to see them (and Uson talking selfies with them behind her, as if they're just the background props she probably believes they are), is alarming.

That's how this happened and what happened as a result of it, but why is it important beyond the Philippines? Beyond observing her dedication to the truth and her status as a most modest hero, answering that question is Ressa's major contribution to the film's broader relevance.

Early into Duterte's rise, Ressa noticed a pattern of online abuse—from insults of varying degrees of offensiveness to more disturbing threats of violence, which included murder and sexual violence. Rappler started piecing together data from Duterte-loyal social media accounts, in order to uncover how lies and other misinformation spreads on the internet (It turns out to be so simple and capable of spreading so widely that one wonders if it would even be possible to combat the trend in any meaningful way). All of this, including Duterte's use of the phrase "fake news" to dismiss any criticism of him, should ring eerily familiar.

Ressa, who chose her native Philippines as her home after growing up in New Jersey and working in major cities around Southeast Asia, clearly is a probing journalist, an ingenious thinker, and a most admirable fighter in a battle for truth and peace against people who have made falsehoods and threats into a campaign strategy. Her story is almost hopeful, because she seems to take every blow against her with a surprisingly cheerful attitude (chuckling when she passes the spot at the airport where she was previously arrested, because she's in the clear), but Ressa herself is also blunt and honest about how the rise of populism and nationalism has all but devastated democracy and the rule of law in the Philippines.

We watch, terrified for these people and aghast at how swiftly and definitively this deterioration of national values and virtues happened. With A Thousand Cuts, Diaz puts us right in the middle of this fight, and as some of the abuse and corruption mirrors the attitude and actions of others, there's a stark reminder: It could happen here, and in some ways, it is happening.

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