Alumna Filmmaker to Discuss ‘A Thousand Cuts’ with Emerson Audience

Alumna filmmaker Ramona Diaz ’83 will discuss her latest award-winning documentary, A Thousand Cuts, with the Emerson community in an online event Tuesday, November 10, 7:00 pm ET.

The film, about Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s assault on the press, will be available on Panopto with an Emerson login starting Monday, November 9, 7:00 pm. Diaz’s conversation with Assistant Professor and filmmaker Maria Aguí Carter will be held over Zoom 24 hours later. Register to receive a link.

A Thousand Cuts (2020) goes inside the escalating war between the Duterte government and a free press. The film follows Maria Ressa, a renowned journalist who has become a top target of Duterte’s crackdown on the news media.

The film was nominated for a Grand Jury Prize at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, and won the David Carr Award for Truth in Non-Fiction Filmmaking at the Montclair Film Festival. It also won Best International Feature at the Documentary Edge Festival.

Diaz is the producer/director of Motherland, about the world’s busiest maternity ward, which took home an award from Sundance in 2017. She has also made films for the documentary television series Independent Lens and P.O.V.

Tuesday night’s discussion is part of Limit(less) Possibilities, a series of free films and moderated discussions about creativity under limitations. It is hosted by the Department of Visual and Media Arts (VMA), with the Alumni Association, the Journalism Department, and the School of Communication.

The next film/discussion in the series will be Sky Hopinka’s Dislocation Blues, an “incomplete and imperfect portrait of reflections from Standing Rock,” on Wednesday, December 2. Having been rescheduled from earlier in the semester, it will be moderated by VMA Professor Kathryn Ramey.