Last week, Give Up Tomorrow, the highly-anticipated new documentary feature by New York filmmaker duo Marty Syjuco and Michael Collins, made its awaited World Premiere in competition at the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival—New York’s prestigious and renowned film showcase.
“It’s exciting because it’s our first film together. It is actually a labor of love. The opportunity to premiere at Tribeca is such an amazing experience,” Marty said when we met with them over brunch in the East Village a few days before the TriBeCa premiere.
Filmed over nearly a decade on three continents and four countries, the film chronicles the controversial case—dubbed the nation’s “Trial of the Century”—Paco Larrañaga, a culinary student and great grandson of a Philippine President, who, with six others, was arrested for and accused of the kidnap, rape, and murder of two sisters on Cebu—the Philippines’s second largest city.
Despite seemingly overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Paco and his peers were charged and sentenced to life imprisonment.
Paco’s sister is married to one of Marty’s brothers. Because of this, Marty said that they were able to get unprecedented and very intimate access to Paco’s family.
“I didn’t know them very well at that time because I was here in New York. I know Mimi well because she’s married to my brother. I learned a lot about the family through the course of the film,” shared Marty.
Utilizing exclusive interviews and research and bringing together elements of murder mystery, courtroom drama and investigative journalism, Give Up Tomorrow, painstakingly unveils a shocking and far-reaching exposé of gross miscarriage of justice at the highest levels.
“The process (in making the film) has been a long one,” said director Michael Collins. “But, in comparison to the amount of time Paco has spent incarcerated, it’s all relative. We wanted to make sure that we had the complete story across the board.”
“We’re excited to share the finished film with a public audience for the first time,” added producer Syjuco. “We’ll leave if for audiences to see for themselves to conclude if justice was indeed served.”
After three sold-out screenings at TriBeCa, Give Up Tomorrow has one more screening scheduled for Friday, April 29, 7pm at Chelsea Clearview.
In addition to the filmmakers, key subjects from the film travelled from The Philippines, Spain and the UK to attend the festival and participate in spirited post-screening Q&A with audience members. More than forty family members and friends, including some from the Larranaga family, also travelled to New York to attend the screeenings.
“It feels like a wedding,” Marty said, laughing.
The self-financed filmmakers interviewed dozens of people, read thousands of pages of documents, and filmed in the Philippines—where a camera was smuggled into the notorious Bilibid Prison to shoot clandestine footage—Spain, the UK and the US.
They used their credit cards to buy a decent camera at B&H. Then, they bought tickets to go back home to the Philippines.
“I had been naively and willfully ignorant of the poverty and injustice all around me, until it hit my family,” Marty said.
Michael had never before visited the country, a prison, or Asia.
“By the next day, I had landed on death row,” he remembers.
Over the next six years, they travelled back to the Philippines four to five more times to make sure that they interviewed enough people.
Back then, all Marty wanted was to share Paco’s story with the rest of the world. Little did he know that the issue had so many layers that began to unravel as they tried to complete the puzzle piece by piece.
This is what Give Up Tomorrow is now. It has gone beyond the story of Paco Larranaga, beyond the flawed justice system in the Philippines. It is now a multi-layered story—like an onion, Marty says—that has elements of provocative drama, cinema verite and gripping personal story-telling.
Not bad for a first film for filmmakers who didn’t originally set out to make movies.
(www.asianjournal.com)
(NYNJ April 29-May 3, 2011 LifeEastyle pg.2)
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