By Minyi Jiang
If journalism is a first draft of history, then documentary is probably a second or third draft, says award-winning Filipino American documentary filmmaker Ramona S. Diaz. But people should experience documentary as cinema, not as a historical account, she told a UC Santa Barbara audience following a recent Carsey-Wolf Center screening of her 2020 documentary A Thousand Cuts.
“I think [a documentary] always becomes part of history,” she said. “It’s a big responsibility, because I don’t think of that as I make a film. I am drawn to characters. That’s what moves me.”
A Thousand Cuts follows Maria Ressa, a Filipino American journalist and the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize laureate who co-founded Rappler, a Filipino online news website. Ressa and her fellow Rappler reporters became targets of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, and the film documents their fight against the erosion of press freedom and journalistic persecution in the Philippines.
Maria Ressa will be at UCSB’s Campbell Hall on Thursday, May 18 to share her stories and discuss her recent book, How to Stand Up to a Dictator, hosted by UCSB Arts and Lectures.
Filipino American documentary filmmaker Ramona S. Diaz, right, joining UCSB Film and Media Studies graduate student Miguel Penabella, for a post-screening discussion of A Thousand Cuts.
Since Rodrigo Duterte came to power in 2016, he has waged a “war on drugs” using hardline approaches such as extrajudicial violence and unlawful killings, causing over 12,000 deaths in the Philippines. His government accused Maria Ressa and her news organization Rappler, which had been highly critical of Duterte, of being at the center of a network plotting a coup, manipulating public sentiment and attempting to destroy the Filipino government.
Diaz’s team was allowed to film Duterte — under surveillance. “I think it kept us safer for him to know that we were filming this,” Diaz said. “He knew what we were filming, because we were filming one of his inner circle, which was General Bato.”
In the Philippines, political campaigns consist of a lot of singing and dancing, and perhaps a five-minute speech of policies, Diaz said. “The more stars and mega stars that you can attract to your campaign, the better, because then you have a longer show with a lot of stars.”
In the film, Diaz documented a Filipino woman asking Maria Ressa why she should care about the drug war when she is not a victim. “A lot of the people there, especially in the rallies for Duterte, they didn’t feel affected by the drug war,” Diaz said, people went to the rallies because of the free food, the real belief in Duterte and the spectacle that is always part of elections there.
In addition, Diaz filmed Mocha Uson, a controversial but well-known Filipino singer, dancer, blogger and politician. It was around midnight, and Uson had lost her 2019 electoral race for the Senate. In a club, Uson was watching a performance of the Mocha Girls – a popular all-girl singing and dancing group in the Philippines that Uson co-founded and led for more than a decade until 2018.
After she came out from the club, some street teenagers came up to her, and Uson treated them to ice cream. “She wasn’t doing it for the camera, it was something so real,” Diaz said, when the street kids started talking about sex and drugs, Uson gave them advice on using condoms and staying away from drugs.
“I thought it was really special, but we couldn't find a place for it in the film,” she said. “It was something quite beautiful, very dark, absolutely dark, but something really genuine.”
Outside of the film, the connection between Diaz and Ressa began years ago when Diaz’s very first documentary film, Imelda, was the subject of a lawsuit in the Philippines. “I had to fly to the Philippines to defend the film, and when I landed, the publicist of the film said: “these are the people who want to talk to you,” she recounted. “On top was Maria Ressa of CNN.”
Diaz was told that Ressa didn’t like the film, and she had criticisms of it. Because Diaz was exhausted from the trip, she turned down the chance to do an interview.
“Fourteen years later, I am in her office, selling her this [current] film and hoping she doesn’t remember,” Diaz said. “She looks at me straight in the face. She goes, ‘just wondering about all those years ago, why did you turn me down?’” After hearing the reasons, Maria Ressa said yes to Diaz.
Minyi Jiang is a fourth-year student at UC Santa Barbara, majoring in Middle East Studies and pursuing a minor in Professional Writing. She is a Web and Social Media Intern for the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.