Palace irked by foreign documentary film on gov’t war on drugs
MANILA, Philippines—Malacañang on Tuesday railed against a foreign documentary on the Duterte administration’s war against illegal drugs as another attempt at black propaganda and disinformation.
Presidential spokesperson Salvador Panelo slammed “On the President’s Orders,” a film on the drug-related killings in the government’s antinarcotics campaign.
‘A dangerous Philippines’
Panelo said the “overly dramatized” documentary film “falsely portrays a dangerous Philippines and a murderous government.”
In a statement, he said the Palace is “vexed by the continuous spread of disinformation against our country’s campaign against illegal drugs and criminality.”
“Based on the trailer of — as well as the commentaries on — the American docufilm, ‘On the President’s Orders,’ it appears that the same is the latest addition to these unmitigated vilifications. Even the title of the docufilm reeks with malice, making it appear that the drug-related deaths were done upon the orders of President Duterte,” he said.
Panelo criticized a description in the film’s website which read that “caught in camera are the victimized slum communities and the police squads blithely executing their countrymen from a perverse moral high ground.”
“We find this derogatory and biased, if not outright fiction. It is obvious that the film medium is riding on the coattails of the President’s international popularity and success, and is being used as a medium to espouse a one-sided information bordering to black propaganda aimed at gullible foreign audiences who know little or zero-knowledge about the Philippines and its government,” Panelo added.
The controversial documentary film will debut at Cinema Village in New York on Oct. 4 and Laemmle Theaters in Los Angeles on Oct. 18, and will air nationwide in the United States on PBS Broadcast next month.
It was included as official selection of 2019 Sheffield DocFest in United Kingdom; 2019 HotDocs Film Festival in Toronto, Canada; 2019 Human Rights Watch Film Festival in New York and 2019 CPH:DOX in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Panelo noted that “foreign audiences have been saturated with false and baseless narratives relative to the Philippine government’s antinarcotics approach, specifically on the nature and number of deaths arising from police operations against it.”
—Julie M. Aurelio
