Using ‘face doubles,’ a new doc captures an ANTI-LGBTQ purge

PLDT deploys solutions to cope with pandemic

BY RIZAL RAOUL S. REYES

THE PLDT is playing a major role in helping the national government confront the challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic.

PLDT-SMART recently announced it is providing free access for all Smart, TNT and SUN subscribers to the “Reliefagad” app (www.reliefagad.ph) of the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) to enable beneficiaries of the government’s social amelioration program to process easily the registration and receive financial assistance electronically.

Launched last May 24 by the DSWD and the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT), Reliefagad,” is an app that facilitates automated cash aid distribution of the government’s social amelioration program (SAP) which aids families affected by the lockdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

The app was developed to address challenges in updating beneficiary data and information as well as to accelerate the distribution of disbursements to beneficiaries. The “Reliefagad” app makes the cash relief distribution faster through e-wallets such as Paymaya, and may be accessed by families who have already received their social amelioration card (SAC).

DSWD partnered with USAID’S E-peso Project and Developers Connect Philippines (Devcon) for the Relief Agad project where a segment of the beneficiaries may self-enroll through an online form.

“We encourage qualified beneficiaries to register to Reliefagad app and link their mobile numbers so they can receive their financial assistance faster via digital means,” Alfredo S. Panlilio, Smart President and CEO and PLDT Chief Revenue Officer, said in a statement.

In the same statement, Jovy Hernandez, EPLDT President and CEO and SVP and head for PLDT and Smart Enterprise Business Groups, added: “We are committed to assisting the DSWD in promoting electronic registrations to the Relief Agad app for more efficient distribution of the second tranche of cash relief through contactless transactions.”

Once they register, citizen beneficiaries can link their mobile numbers and choose their preferred means to receive their financial assistance. Options include ewallets such as Paymaya.

In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, Hernandez said PLDT and Smart have continued to introduce solutions that aim to streamline operations and enable customers with the means to stay connected— whether it be for personal or professional reasons.

As the only Filipino company that is a member to the Wireless Broadband Alliance (WBA), he pointed out that PLDT-SMART underscored its commitment to enable a greater majority with access to public Wi-fi in this year’s recent celebration of #Worldwifiday last June 20. Moreover, initiatives to power Covid-19 facilities and key offices also fall in line with the WBA’S call for members to ensure the deployment of public Wi-fi for the underserved and unconnected.

“Since its launch, our Smart Wifi service has always been a tool that was designed to connect, inform and educate users. We are grateful to both customers that have trusted us with deploying the service to their sites, as well as the WBA which has given even more purpose to our mission,” Hernandez said. “#Worldwifiday was created with the aim of allowing participants of both the public and private sectors to recognize the role of Wi-fi in bridging a digital divide. Such thrust could not be any more apt than it is today,” said Tiago Rodrigues, CEO of the WBA, in a press statement.

In another development, PLDT Enterprise recently provided mobile connectivity solutions to food delivery service Foodpanda to ease their riders’ daily operations. This collaboration gave birth to the Smart Ka-panda Postpaid plan, which is a foodpanda exclusive mobile bundle that provides riders the ability to make use of their delivery app, Roadrunner, as well as other navigational applications. The program was created to bridge the gap between the riders and customers.

BY JAKE COYLE | The Associated Press

ANONYMOUS sources in documentaries have often been reduced to a shadowy, voice-distorted figure—or worse, a pixelated blur. But a new documentary premiering Tuesday on HBO has, with the aid of advanced digital technology, gone to greater lengths to preserve the secrecy of its sources while still conveying their humanity.

Welcome to Chechnya, directed by David France, is about an underground pipeline created to rescue LGBTQ Chechens from the Russian republic where the government has for several years waged a crackdown on gays. In the predominantly Muslim region in southern Russia ruled by strongman Ramzan Kadyrov, LGBTQ Chechens have been detained, tortured and killed.

France, the filmmaker behind How to Survive a Plague and The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson, worked in secrecy with the Russian LGBT Network, a group formed to help save gay Chechens and find them asylum abroad.

But France had a dilemma. He couldn’t reveal the identities, or the faces, of his main characters. Their lives depended on staying anonymous.

Yet France still wanted to faithfully show the trials they were enduring. This was a tragedy that needed a face. That meant none of the old methods of cloaking anonymous sources would work.

“They were dehumanizing,” France said in an interview. “I believe one of the reasons we haven’t been hearing about this ongoing crime against humanity in the south of Russia is because we haven’t been able to hear from the people and see the people who have suffered this unspeakable torture. When the only testimony of a crime of this magnitude comes from people who are behind a curtain, it lacks the empathy of the public that this story truly deserves.”

France didn’t know how he would resolve the issue, but he promised those he shot that he would somehow disguise them. After searching and testing a range of approaches, France settled on a novel one: In Welcome to Chechnya, the faces of all the LGBTQ Chechens have been replaced using artificial intelligence. It’s a little like the documentary answer to The Irishman or a more altruistic version of a “deepfake.”

The faces seen in Welcome to Chechnya belong, in fact, to 22 volunteers whose faces were superimposed on the people in the film. Most of them are LGBTQ activists in New York. The “face doubles” were shot on a blue screen stage and converted into algorithms that, with machine learning, could digitally mask the subjects of the film. Different voices were substituted, too. “Nobody had ever really attempted this before,” said France. “And most people said it was impossible. It turned out it was pretty close to impossible but not impossible.” The technology was developed by software architect Ryan Laney. And its implementation was decided through a study organized by Dartmouth College Prof. Thalia Wheatley, an expert in brain sciences. She showed 109 students different visual effects options of Welcome to Chechnya to determine which one conveyed empathy the best and avoided an “uncanny valley” effect. (Another less successful option was using filters to render the film’s individuals cartoon-like caricatures.)

Still, adding the face doubles throughout the film was a grueling, months-long process that only concluded a week before the premiere of Welcome to Chechnya at the Sundance Film Festival in January.

The Irishman, by comparison, altered its actors’ faces in highly planned scenes with carefully orchestrated camera movement. France’s documentary was full of erratic movements of both camera and people.

Every step of the way, France and his editors worked on encryption drives, and never let their original footage with real faces touch the Internet or even a computer that had previously been connected to the internet. They edited in what France calls a windowless bunker in Los Angeles.

“It added a lot of time to our work,” said France, “But it reminded us everyday what the stakes were and what it meant to be the people whose lives were shared with us and entrusted us in sharing their lives with a wider audience.” ■