A New Documentary Observes How Spectacle, Disinformation, and History Collide in an Election

And So It Begins premieres via Independent Lens on WTTW Monday, May 12 at 9:00 pm and will be available to stream. 

In March, the former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte was arrested on a warrant from the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity for ordering a war against drugs in which tens of thousands of people died. He is expected to win re-election to his eighth term as mayor of Davao City on May 12 from his prison cell in Europe.

Duterte, who finished his single allowed term as president in 2022, “left office one of the most popular presidents the Philippines has ever had,” says Ramona S. Diaz, the filmmaker behind And So It Begins, a new documentary about the 2022 elections to replace Duterte that premieres May 12 on WTTW and PBS via Independent Lens. His daughter, Sara Duterte, was widely expected to run for president in those 2022 elections but instead joined the ticket of Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos, Jr. as vice president in a race against Rodrigo Duterte’s own vice president, Leni Robredo.

Presidents and vice presidents in the Philippines are elected separately and so can be from opposing parties, as Duterte and Robredo were. Rodrigo Duterte – known for boasting about his virility, cursing, and making sexual jokes about women, including his vice president –  disparaged Robredo as a “colossal blunder” and said, “You’re better off choosing a dictator in the likes of Marcos” over her. His support instead followed his daughter to Marcos, who is colloquially known as “BBM.”

But after BBM and Sara Duterte won against Robredo in 2022, “their partnership devolved very quickly, quicker than I expected,” says Diaz, who now lives in the United States but grew up in the Philippines and has made numerous documentaries about the country. Sara Duterte currently faces an impeachment trial for plotting to have BBM assassinated, among other charges. Diaz believes that Marcos cooperated with the International Criminal Court’s arrest of Rodrigo Duterte because of the breakdown of the Marcos-Duterte alliance. “He didn’t want President Duterte to stay in the country,” because of his popularity and his family’s position as rivals, she says. But now Duterte could be portrayed as a political martyr.

This is the complicated political world into which Diaz brings the viewer in And So It Begins. She follows the doomed candidacy of Robredo as it grows from a “lonely campaign” with “no money,” in Robredo’s words, to a vibrant movement of pink-clad supporters lining streets, singing songs about Robredo, dancing, and rallying in the hundreds of thousands. Politicians in the Philippines can almost resemble pop culture stars – indeed, the famous boxer Manny Pacquiao also ran for president in 2022.

There’s an intersection between “politics and show business” in the Philippines, says Diaz, and “every politician has a kind of spectacle.”

Such spectacle was a major feature of Imelda Marcos, the wife of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos infamous for her lavish shoe collection, extravagant lifestyle, and grand projects. Her husband ruled the country under martial law from 1972 to 1981 before being deposed by a revolution in 1986. The family went into exile in Hawaii before being allowed to return after Ferdinand’s death and to re-enter politics. BBM is Ferdinand and Imelda’s son.

BBM’s election to the presidency is “still a shock to me,” says Diaz, who grew up under martial law and was inspired to become a documentary filmmaker by the promise of democracy and activism after the People Power Revolution that ousted Marcos. “I can’t even say ‘President Marcos’ sometimes, so I always say ‘BBM,’” she says. “I thought we did this already.”

But she says that the Marcoses began rehabilitating their name and whitewashing history soon after their return to the Philippines in 1991 – it was already underway when she made a film about Imelda Marcos in the early 2000s. “So it shouldn’t be a surprise, but it is still when it happens,” she says, adding that the history of the Marcos years “wasn’t taught well in schools,” allowing them to instead be cast as a “golden age” of big infrastructure projects.

She also argues that the promises of the democratic revolution were never fully realized, and that social media and disinformation have played a large role in the popularity of the Marcoses and Dutertes. Her previous film, A Thousand Cuts, focused in part on the rising power of social media by following the journalist Maria Ressa, who fights disinformation and was charged with various specious crimes by the Duterte administration. Ressa has since won the Nobel Peace Prize.

“How can you have election integrity if you don’t have integrity of facts?” Ressa asked in her Nobel speech.

Ressa is also prominent in And So It Begins – you get to watch her learn about the Nobel while on a Zoom call. “I realized that what Maria was saying about social media and disinformation was going to play out in real time” in the 2022 presidential elections, Diaz says, which is why she decided to make them the focus of And So It Begins. Watching the effect of disinformation throughout the course of an election makes it “less academic,” she says.

Of course, widespread disinformation isn’t limited to the Philippines, as Ressa herself has often argued. In a recent interview with PBS News Hour, she compared the first weeks of the second Trump administration with the Duterte administration. “It’s exactly what we have lived through, except accelerated,” she said. “It’s incredible how fast it's going.”

Diaz agrees. “It’s shocking to me, because it seems like the Philippines,” she says. Because of the similarity, she believes the experience of the Philippines offers a lesson for the United States, which is, “You have to push back immediately. Like Maria always says, you have to fight for your rights immediately.”

“I have an immigrant’s belief in this country, because I chose it,” she says. “I still believe in it.”