Convicted of cyber libel on June 18, Filipino activist Maria Ressa faces the possibility of decades in prison. A Thousand Cuts , a new documentary from PBS Distribution, follows Ressa as the events that led to her arrest and trial unfolds. The film opens virtually in the United States on August 7, with international screenings to follow. Its director, Ramona Diaz, started research on the film in 2016, after Rodrigo Duterte was elected president of the Philippines and initiated a deadly war against drugs. She began shooting during the 2018 elections, covering candidates Ronald dela Rosa, a retired police general, former pop star Mocha Uson, and opposition hopeful Samir Gutoc. Diaz contrasted their campaigns with profiles of investigative journalists such as Patricia Evangelista and Pia Ranada, reporters who were increasingly demonised by the Duterte administration. “I’ve never done breaking news before,” Diaz told the Post last week on a Zoom conference call with Ressa. “The way I work is immersive. You find a centre of gravity. Maria just really popped up, and the film gravitated towards her, because she and her news site Rappler were speaking very loudly against the administration. Not just the drug war, but misinformation. Also, she started getting arrested.” “Last year I was arrested twice in five weeks,” Ressa elaborates. “I had to post bail eight times. Just this week we had a hearing on a tax case and then today the second cyber libel case is going to the prosecutor’s office.” The cases against Ressa are based on distorted interpretations of the law, some applied retroactively. They are meant to silence her. On top of government harassment, Ressa has been subject to relentless abuse on social media, including graphic rape and death threats. Halfway through A Thousand Cuts , she hires additional security and starts wearing a bulletproof vest. Imelda Marcos documentary maker on the Philippines’ infamous former first lady “I feel as safe as anyone can be in the Philippines,” she says. “My biggest problem has been the social media platforms. Hong Kong certainly knows about this. How can we at Rappler compare ourselves to what Hong Kong is going through? And this pandemic has affected all of us, added this extra layer of stress. For me it’s like a roller coaster, four years of a roller coaster. I keep trying to convince myself that I like roller coasters, even though I don’t.” Rappler is a digital news website Ressa, a former CNN bureau chief, founded with three other reporters. She describes it as a marrying of investigative journalism, technology, and community activism. “It’s my reimagination of what news organisations should be like,” she says. “What’s the line between journalism and advocacy? We believe that we’re in a battle for facts, a global battle. And in that battle, journalists are the front-liners. Journalists are advocates. Journalists are activists.” Journalists are also targets for Duterte. At one point in the documentary he tells reporters: “If you end up dead, it’s your fault.” “Here in the Philippines, ‘journalist’ equals ‘criminal,’” Ressa says. “I feel like a Cassandra because I have been saying this over and over again since 2016. I saw it personally. Journalists are far from perfect, but we are under attack on so many different fronts. Trust and credibility are under attack. The information ecosystem is broken.” “As Maria says in the film, it’s not about content,” Diaz notes. “Content is a whack-a-mole game. It’s about tracking the network of disinformation. To me the real job of the film is to make that understandable visually.” “Facebook didn’t do enough, social media platforms didn’t do enough,” Ressa argues. “Attacks on social media are meant to incite hate, to dehumanise the target. You pound the target to silence, because these attacks are vicious. You also create a manufactured consensus, a fake bandwagon effect.” Diaz waits until halfway through A Thousand Cuts to show Ressa’s private life, a strategy she refers to as “peeling the onion”. It turns out Ressa is a spirited jokester, indefatigably upbeat, a beacon of hope. “I’m optimistic by nature, I’m a happy person,” she insists. “I have really good news for our shareholders meeting on Friday. In 2018, when the government started filing charges against us, we lost 49 per cent of our advertisers. So we developed a business-to-business model that’s really helped in the Covid world.” Safety remains a concern. Diaz includes a chilling moment in A Thousand Cuts when agitators live-stream their attempt to break into Rappler offices. “It was very important to explain to the crew that they didn’t have to stick around,” Diaz says. “Especially after Maria got arrested. But they all stayed. You do think about your own safety. But what am I a documentary filmmaker for if I let fear get the better of me?” “If this time didn’t matter so much, I would be quiet,” Ressa adds. “I hate that the baton was passed to me, but I also feel I have to do what I’m supposed to do. Otherwise I’m not who I am. It’s a weird thing, right? You don’t really know who you are until you have to fight to defend it.” Diaz filmed 800 hours of footage while making A Thousand Cuts . She had an abbreviated editing schedule of a little more than four months before premiering the documentary at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, in the US state of Utah, in January 2020. The most recent material in the film covers the verdict in Ressa’s first court case. “We added that just recently,” Diaz says. “Before, the movie ended at Christmas on a hopeful note. It feels very different now. But this is the reality. “I feel a certain regret about the Philippines. In 1986, when [Ferdinand] Marcos left, we had fought so hard. Building institutions takes forever, generations. Take your eyes off the ball and everything goes to pot. You have to be vigilant.” Ressa has been honoured for her work around the world. She was one of the journalists named “Person of the Year” by Time magazine in 2018, and has been feted by celebrities such as Amal Clooney at the Clooney Foundation for Justice. And yet, in a worst-case scenario, she faces a prison sentence of over 60 years. “Obviously jail is a possibility,” she admits. “I have to deal with that. And the runway keeps getting shorter. But that would be my request: continue helping us shine a light. We’ve survived this long because of the kindness of strangers, so please check out crowdfunding for Rappler to help with our legal fees. And number one: hold Silicon Valley accountable.” For Ressa, in the Philippines, like Hong Kong, what happens in the next few months will determine whether democracy survives. “The law is bent to the point that it is broken. Our institutions are weak. What we are seeing is a thousand cuts to our democracy. Every generation gets the democracy it deserves, so fight for your rights. Fight for democracy,” she says. Want more articles like this? Follow SCMP Film on Facebook