Tribeca 2011: Give Up Tomorrow Review
By David Kempler
You're Always a Day Away
Making its international premiere at the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival is the documentary, "Give Up Tomorrow", a twisted tale of injustice, institutionalized corruption, and a just plain unbelievable set of circumstances. No, it's not about Wall Street. This time, the corruption isn't even in the continental United States. It's the police force and government in the Philippines that are being exposed for their crazy inadequacies.
In one of the largest murder trials ever seen in the Philippines, a group of young men stand accused of the rape and murder of two young sisters. The country had been in an uproar after the bodies of the girls were found and vengeance was demanded. Who would pay wasn't all that important to the police force.
"Give Up Tomorrow" focuses on Paco, one of the accused, primarily because he had connections who could tell the story. This is partially a strength and partially a weakness of the whole thing. If you are interested in investigating what exactly happened in a murder and trial, how do you leave out the majority of the defendants?
Paco comes from a fairly well-off family which makes him a more enticing target, or at least that is part of the theory presented by filmmakers Michael Collins and Marty Syjuco. The central problem facing the prosecution is that Paco was hundreds of miles away when the murders took place. There are numerous eyewitnesses and photos that attest to this. Not a big deal, really. The prosecution argues that this is inadmissible, although it's not clear why. Naturally, the court agrees with this brilliant strategy.
One of the tragedies is that the parents of both the victims and the accused want justice and the justice that they seek is mutually exclusive. The mother of the murdered girls is sure that Paco and his group are guilty and she has the connections to make it stick. That is why logic is thrown to the wind and the group is found guilty. Even though mom seems joyfully vengeful, how can you dislike her - her two daughters were slaughtered. The parents of Paco are even more sympathetic because their son is rotting away in jail and facing execution.
By the end, there is some resolution but it is woefully empty. There are no winners and lots of losers. It's a shame that Collins and Syjuco couldn't expand a bit on the other defendants and whether they were possibly guilty. It's hard to spend a lot of time watching the explanation of a murder and a murder trial only to be left with more questions than answers. Perhaps it is because the story hasn't really reached a conclusion yet. "Give Up Tomorrow" is a compelling story but I couldn't help but feel like I had only seen the first two acts of a play.
