Reviews: And So It Begins from Sundance 2024

Final Rating: 2/5

While we are still in the midst of the 2024 Oscars season at the moment, the race for the 2025 Oscars has begun with the annual Sundance Film Festival. While I have yet to make that pilgrimage out to Park City, Utah for the in person festival, this was my first year taking advantage of the online screenings being offered; usually I’m barely keeping ahead with the ongoing Oscars Death Race to try and forecast who will have the momentum out of Sundance to be relevant a year later. However two films caught my eye enough to buy virtual tickets – one when the festival lineup was announced, and one after it ended up winning a couple of prizes. 

As a Filipino American, it’s no surprise that Ramona S. Diaz’s latest documentary would be on my to-watch list. Diaz is known for centering her documentaries on the everlasting effects of authoritarianism in the Philippines; her 2003 documentary Imelda about the eponymous former first lady, her 2017 documentary Motherland about a maternity hospital in the Philippines, and her 2020 documentary A Thousand Cuts about Nobel Peace Prize winning journalist Maria Ressa and attacks on press freedom under president Rodrigo Duterte.

And So It Begins picks up shortly after where A Thousand Cuts left off – with the Philippines constitution limiting presidents to one six year term, the story nominally follows opposition candidate, Vice President Leni Robredo (president and vice president are separately elected) as she campaigns against Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr., (son of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos) and his VP candidate Sara Duterte (daughter of President Duterte). 

We follow Robredo as she holds rallies around the country, while Marcos Jr. avoids participating in debates or any serious questioning. We see how the Marcos family worked to rehabilitate their image through a combination of philanthropic propaganda and social media trolling and misinformation. And ultimately we see how despite Robredo’s camp’s efforts, 31 million Filipinos still elected Marcos Jr. to the presidency. 

As someone who respects Diaz’s work, I think this film is more of a direct sequel to A Thousand Cuts than its own standalone movie, and I can’t help but compare the two. In Cuts, we got unparalleled access to Ressa in private moments as she navigated the attacks on her and her news site Rappler by Duterte. Here, there isn’t the same level of access to Robredo to make for an interesting profile; rather we often turn back to following Ressa during this time, with a portion of the film documenting her acceptance of the Nobel Prize. 

Likewise in Cuts we get a breakdown of the mechanics of the disinformation network uncovered by Rappler and how it spread disinformation in the terminally online Philippines; here the most we get of that are conversations with Robredo’s social media team of how they have to fight trolls. And while as someone who is at least nominally familiar with the proposed policies and track record of the respective camps in this election, I could understand why Robredo would make a better president than Marcos. The film doesn’t really do too much digging beyond “look at how the Marcos family never apologized for their actions and duped so many people into voting for them.” 

At a runtime of two hours, this film both felt like it didn’t go deep enough into any topic of interest while also dragging on (in comparison, Cuts was a tight 99 minutes). I would have liked to see at the end beyond a message of “we need to start prepping for the 2028 election,” some mention of Robredo’s continued work post election with her anti-poverty non profit Angat Buhay, as well as the accomplishments and policies (or lack thereof) of the Marcos regime thus far.

For all these criticisms, I still see this documentary as relevant today. In many ways, the Philippines presidential election forecast the surge of the right wing politics in 2016 alongside Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. And now in 2024 with another US Presidential election nearing in November, the world anxiously awaits to see whether America has truly learned its lesson as 2020 showed, or whether the tactics of disinformation and political polarization will prevail as they did in the Philippines in 2022. 

And at the very least we got to see how when Filipinos hold election rallies, they rally like no one else.