Documentaries: The Philippines

Tirador (transl. Slingshot) is a 2007 film directed by Brillante Mendoza. Produced by the Centerstage Productions, the film shows the political undertones of the Filipinos who are living in poverty.

Plot

The movie revolves around the lives of Rex, Caloy, Leo and Odie in the streets of Quiapo, Manila. Quiapo is known to be one of the most crowded, depressed and notorious areas in Manila. The movie was set during Holy Week and the 2007 elections that showed both the political and religious stands of a typical Filipino in the slums. The low-life criminals are portrayed in a way that humanizes them, and was compared to the corrupt and hypocritical politicians who exploits the poor.

Production

The movie was produced by Centerstage Productions, Rollingball Entertainment and Ignite Media. Tirador was distributed in the Philippines through the same production in 2007 and was also shown internationally in France through Swift Distribution and Peccadillo Pictures in 2009 in UK.

Themes and Symbolism

Low-life and one-dimensional characters

The movie showed the cruelty of the society and how a regular Filipino, living in the slums survives another day. 

Machismo

Tirador showed how men are forced into machismo, and how weak a human soul is. Evil has its own way to corrupt the minds of people in all social classes because of strong and selfish human urges.[2] 

Impact

The main actors played realistic roles, that mirrored how men live in the slum area. The movie exposed the contrasts of corruption in all classes, where the influential was placed in the hot seat. It also showed the difference of societal levels and the animalistic instinct of humans to survive.

A Rustling of Leaves: Inside the Philippine Revolution is a Canadian documentary film, directed by Nettie Wild and released in 1988.The film is a portrait of the political upheaval in the Philippines in the 1980s, including the People Power Revolution which ended the presidency of Ferdinand Marcos and the country's uneasy transition toward democracy under his successor Corazon Aquino.

The film had its roots when Wild travelled to the Philippines as part of a theatre exchange program in 1985, when the group she was workshopping a play with was shelled by government forces. Wild pledged to return to the Philippines as soon as possible to make a documentary film about the campaign to oust Marcos, only to have the People Power Revolution take place before she could get back and thus changing the film's intended focus to include figures that supported the government as well, including an interview with Aquino herself.

Review 

Two short documentaries from National Geographic both involve international human rights issues, but the films aren’t especially complementary.

The longer and more substantial of the pair is “The Nightcrawlers,” a ground-level look at the violent antidrug campaign waged by President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines. Human rights groups estimate that police and vigilantes have killed thousands accused of dealing or using drugs. 

The director Alexander A. Mora crosscuts between two groups: photojournalists who have brought images of the brutality to a global public, and anonymous or pseudonymous vigilantes. Ignoring due process does not seem to trouble the second group. “If the police cannot touch you, we are the ones sent to kill you,” one says.

A man presented as a vigilante commander says that he also earns money taking tourists around an island. Another man identified as a vigilante claims that police helped cover up a mistaken hit by his outfit. Mora might have provided more information on how he secured his eyebrow-raising access. And much of what we see is presented with frustratingly little context. Near the end, Mora cuts to black as shots ring out. We’re left wondering whether anyone was killed.

“Lost and Found” is a profile of Kamal Hussein, who works at a Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh to reunite children with their parents. The director, Orlando von Einsiedel, who won an Oscar for “The White Helmets” in 2017, emphasizes the nobility of Hussein’s calling but offers little else. The credits cite the involvement of the Nobel Prize organization in the movie’s production, but Von Einsiedel’s sentimental purview and manipulative scoring suggest his main goal is winning another Oscar.

NYT Critic's Pick

Reviewed By Ben Kenigsberg

New York Times

Aug. 10, 2020

The death by a thousand cuts that gives this  documentary from Ramona S. Diaz its title is the death of democracy — a slow wounding that eventually makes the democracy too weak to survive. And while that assessment, offered by the journalist Maria Ressa, refers to the Philippines under Rodrigo Duterte, the absorbing and multipronged “A Thousand Cuts” presents the country as a test lab for autocracy — and suggests that its experiments have a high potential to travel.

Refreshingly, the film is not simply a profile of Ressa, who founded the news site Rappler and has fearlessly chronicled the abuses of Duterte’s presidency and the violence it has encouraged against purported drug dealers and addicts, but a kaleidoscopic dissection of how information courses through the country. It illustrates social media’s capacity to deceive and to entrench political power.

While Duterte dismisses Rappler’s articles as “rife with innuendos and pregnant with falsity,” the movie implies that such colorful language is part of an image-softening strategy. Diaz follows the parallel senate campaigns of Ronald dela Rosa, a Duterte loyalist also known as Bato, and Samira Gutoc, an opposition party candidate. The pop-music-singing Bato acts more like an entertainer than a public servant.

But the principal focus is Ressa, whom Diaz captures in offhand moments. She trails Ressa as she steps off a plane in the Philippines anticipating being detained. Elsewhere, Ressa tells a sibling, “The only way to not be afraid is to understand the worst-case scenario, and embrace it.” The movie ends by noting Ressa’s conviction in June in a cyber libel case — part of a raft of charges against her widely seen as a government effort to stifle reporting. Exactly how many cuts are left?