By Ed Diokno, Special to AsAmNews
The Philippines has been out of the consciousness of most Americans for awhile. Out of sight, out of mind.
The last time the Philippines made headlines in the United States (outside of natural disasters) was when nuns stopped tanks in their tracks during the bloodless People Power revolution, the last days of the dictatorship of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos.
A new documentary by award-winning documentary filmmaker Lauren Greenfield brings Imelda Marcos — she of the 3,000 pairs of shoes and one-half of the conjugal dicatorship — back into the spotlight.
The Marcos family and their reemergence as a popular and politically powerful factor in Philippine politics is the subject Greenfield’s film The Kingmaker.
“I miss the clout of being the First Lady,” Imelda says as she wanders through her house full of mementos and portraits of her late husband and their time as the powerful despots plundering the country for their own wealth.
Imelda plays to the camera portraying herself as a misunderstood victim as she tries to rewrite history reimagining her and her husband’s 20-year dictatorship as a golden age. “She’s a very controlling figure,” says Greenfield. She’ has this amazing ability to create these character moments.” We see this in the film when she hands out pesos to school children, when she greets her adoring crowds or as she sits beneath a portrait of her husband explaining how she is misunderstood and her new role as the country’s “mother.”
Since her family’s return to the Philippines after Marcos’ death in Hawaii, they have reinserted themselves into the country’s politics. The eldest daughter is governor of Marcos’ home province Ilocos Norte and the only son, Bong Bong, as the heir apparent ran for vice president in 2016. The plan is to eventually put the Marcos family back in Malacanang Palace, the Philippines’ White House.
Thankfully, the Marcos scion lost to current Vice President Leni Robredo, but he is challenging the outcome. He has powerful friends in his quest that is making its way to the Philippines Supreme Court.
The Marcos family, we learn in the documentary, helped finance Rolando Duterte’s presidential campaign and in the Philippine custom of paying back debts, wants Bong Bong by his side. He replaced the Supreme Court Chief Justice who opposed Bong Bong’s appeal with one of his puppets and the recount, officially, is still uncompleted.
Which brings us back to the Marcos wealth. Where did they get all that money to live their lavish lifestyle? Government offices don’t pay that well and they have no visible means of support.
All the ill-gotten wealth the Marcoses accumulated when in power was never returned. When they were in power, Imelda would buy real estate all around the world on a whim and Picasso’s hung in their living room.
Their wealth is what brought them to Lauren Greenfield’s attention. There’s a theme that runs through all of Greenfield’s documentaries, The Wealth Generation and The Queen of Versailles. The accumulation of wealth, or the pursuit of wealth, wealth inequality corrupts our society and the Marcos family is a prime example of that corruption.
She refuses to apologize for the Marcos era. In fact, “it was the opposite,” says Greenfield. In Imelda’s interpretation of history, “those were the best days of the Philippines.”
It was when Greenfield was faced with these lies that she decided to show the other side of the story. “When I saw untruths, I needed a way to tell the audience what was true,” says Greenfield.
“Her story contradicted first-person testimonials,” Greenfield says. The director and writer was able to accomplish this in The Kingmaker with interviews of some of the victims of the regime, during which political opponents disappeared, tortured or killed.
With no narration, Greenfield allows the viewers to come to their own conclusion. The documentary shifts to the truth tellers- the women who were sexually molested and tortured and the poor villagers evicted from their island to make room for African animals imported by Imelda for their beauty. The contrast between Imelda’s imagination and the truth was an effective emotional punch in the gut.
Imelda’s true nature comes near the end of the documentary, when she tried to equate her new role as the nation’s mother, “Its hard when you lose your money … your mother,” she says in a slip of the tongue.
Greenfield hopes The Kingmaker is viewed as a cautionary tale. Indeed, One of the first things Marcos did when he declared martial law was to take control the media. In this way he began to warp people’s perceptions of the truth, of their own history.
Sound familiar? Discrediting the Fourth Estate as fake news and taking spinning the news for one’s own benefit cuts off the real information people need to make sound decisions. “An informed public,” Greenfield says, “is the basis of democracy.”
“The Kingmaker” makes its debut Dec. 13 in the San Francisco Bay Area in select theaters although it has already been released in other parts of the country. Showtime will begin airing it in January, 2020.
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