Acclaimed Philippine filmmaker backs Duterte’s drug war
MaNILa: Awardwinning Philippine director Brillante Mendoza has turned his cinematic skills to promoting someone many in the West would see as an unlikely hero – President Rodrigo Duterte and his deadly drug war.
Mendoza has become a celebrated figure in the global independent film industry for his gritty movies exposing social injustice in his home country.
While critics have condemned Duterte’s anticrime crackdown, which has claimed the lives of thousands, Mendoza has filmed government advertisements promoting it and directed the broadcast of a presidential address to the nation.
“If there’s one person who understands the situation, it’s the president,” Mendoza, 56, said at his Manila production house, which is full of posters of his movies and trophies from top film festivals such as Cannes, Venice and Berlin.
“I know there are a lot of people who are not supportive in totality of what he wants and what he’s doing right now, but if you actually have witnessed the real situation, this is the way to go about it.”
The president has repeatedly insisted that police were only killing in selfdefence and that most of the unexplained deaths were due to criminals attacking each other.
But Western governments and human rights organisations have expressed fears about alleged extrajudicial killings and a breakdown in the rule of law.
Those concerns have been fuelled by Duterte’s extreme language and comments viewed by critics as incitements to kill.
Mendoza, whose films have earned him a French knighthood and a best director award at Cannes, declined to comment on the extrajudicial killings issue.
He also said he had no personal knowledge of such deaths and insisted that foreign critics misunderstood Duterte due to a culture clash.
Mendoza said he became aware of the full extent of the nation’s drug problem when researching his film Ma’ Rosa, which won the Cannes best actress award in May and earned a nomination in next year’s Oscars for best foreign language film.
Ma’ Rosa focuses on a mother selling drugs to make ends meet who is arrested by corrupt policemen.
According to Mendoza, the drug problem is so complex that it and Duterte cannot just be looked at through the lens of mass killings.
“I am not advocating that people who are poor should be put to death. But at the end of the day, we shouldn’t only see it from that perspective,” he said. “There are a lot of sides we have to consider.” — AFP