Nobel Peace Prize winner and Rappler CEO Maria Ressa nearly faced over a century in prison for speaking the truth. She was criminally charged with 10 cases by the Filipino government, and in fact, some said it was imminent that she would be imprisoned. She’s been harassed and bullied, receiving up to 90 hate messages and death threats per an hour at one point. And yet, she still bravely perseveres, striving for truth.
“In order to keep doing my job, I had to be OK with going to jail for over 100 years,” the journalist told the audience at the Sunrise House at the 2024 Sundance Festival. “You keep going. You keep finding energy.”
Targeted by the former Filipino president Rodrigo Duterte, Ressa was the main subject of Ramona S. Diaz’s 2020 Frontline documentary “A Thousand Cuts,” which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival four years ago. Duterte’s formal assault on news media began in 2016, a war waged online by his loyalists even before his election. The president claimed Ressa was publishing fake news through her media outlet Rappler and had her arrested for cyber libel. This happened in the Philippines even before the “fake news” rhetoric reached our shores.
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Diaz’s latest documentary “And So It Begins” was never meant to be a sequel. Yet there was a demand to know how Ressa’s story concluded. Ressa was joined by Diaz (“Imelda”) and former vice president of the Philippines Leni Robredo to talk about the companion documentary which debuted this year, also at Sundance.
When the Philippines was still in COVID-19 lockdown, Diaz went there planning to create a follow-up documentary, only to find that the political situation was continuing to evolve. Robredo, who served as vice president during Duterte’s term from 2016 to 2022, was about to run for presidential office. Her opponent: Bongbong Marcos, the son of notorious…
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