Sundance 2024
Disappointed because I was hoping to be able to endorse a 🇵🇭 film. It’s a documentary that follows the 2022 presidential election predominantly from the sidelines of the Leni Robredo campaign.  It also follows journalist Maria Ressa as a means to call attention to the massive role that propaganda and disinformation plays in the election cycle.  There is not much depth to this doc beyond that. No details as to the charges Ressa is facing, no substance as to a platform that Robredo is running on. It’s honestly loads and loads of pink-out events with song and dance karaoke songs with Leni’s name inserted I to the lyrics. Sadly, it seemed pretty clear to me from the start…

Here is the thing: we know how it ends, and it's really deflating. There's remarkable footage of this campaign, of people banding together in a way that feels once-in-a-lifetime. And it should be inspiring stuff, except we are actually living in the future of this documentary, and Leni Robredo isn't president. She is still doing good work, as is Maria Ressa, but for most of its runtime, the film acts like it's headed to an alternate timeline.

As a documentary, it's pretty shapeless. It's kind of interesting how it allows itself to get sidetracked, at one point introducing us to Miss Gay Bicolandia and following her as they direct a man where to hang up the pink banderitas for Leni's…

For a film so much about the increasing prominence of disinformation, many viewers have expressed their disappointment online with the film’s false marketing: it’s not actually a deep dive into the presidential campaign of VP Leni Robredo. It’s more of a formless observational documentary set in the aftermath of director Ramona S. Diaz’s previous film, A Thousand Cuts. It’s neither an insightful insider’s look into the machinations of the campaign, nor does it seem to strive to give outsiders a comprehensive understanding of the movement’s appeal. Robredo is present for around half of the film, but primarily in clips of her public appearances, usually giving speeches to her different constituents about the need to hold on to hope for a…

let me start out by saying: there is no way for me to objectively rate this. it doesn’t just hit close to home—this is my home. and despite all the tangled, complicated feelings i have about the philippines and my upbringing there, i am tied to this place and its history forever (i literally spotted my uncle in the EDSA revolution archival footage, and don’t even get me started on growing up with the children/families of these politicians). 

on it’s own, diaz’s follow up doc to 2020’s A Thousand Cuts falls flat. tackling another vital topic, it fails to connect the dots to the larger story and ultimately the larger warnings at stake, failing to capitalize on an opportunity to…

My personal experiences and recollections from this particular election cycle were why I felt so emotional in the theater, not the film itself. I could’ve been sitting in my dorm room looking at past footage of the Leni-Kiko/BBM-Sara campaigns on YouTube and done all that same emoting anyway. The documentary itself was shallow and told us nothing we didn’t already know.

If this is a documentary about Leni Robredo’s election campaign, why do we spend so much time with Maria Ressa? (Well, the answer is obvious: this is meant to be a sequel to A Thousand Cuts.) If this is a “people’s campaign,” why is the spotlight disproportionately given to the same liberal talking heads we’ve seen a billion times…