【影片簡介】永不放棄 Give Up Tomorrow

 

 

 

美國 USA︱2011︱95 min︱Michael COLLINS

 

2011  紐約翠貝卡影展觀眾票選獎、最佳新進紀錄片導演評審團特別獎

Heineken Audience Award & Best New Documentary Director- Special Jury Prize, Tribeca Film Festival

2011  英國雪菲爾德紀錄片電影節

Audience Award, Sheffield Doc / Fest

2011  西班牙瓦倫西亞人權影展觀眾票選獎

Audience Award, Valencia Human Rights Film Festival

 

一九九七年七月，轟動菲律賓全國的鍾氏姊妹姦殺案，讓一名十九歲的少年至今深陷囹圄，法官及社會輿論一致認定，是來自馬尼拉富裕家庭的西班牙裔混血少年帕可（Paco LARRANAGA）因感情糾紛，教唆其他六位同夥，至菲律賓南方的宿霧島，綁架並姦殺了相對弱勢的華裔兩姊妹。然而，在帕可的老師與同學們為帕可提供的不在場證明不被採納之後，受害者家屬在法庭上的通靈證詞、以及審案法官的離奇死亡，卻令人不得不懷疑事實的真相。

 

帕可獲判死刑後，引起西班牙社會極高的關注與同情，連西班牙首相薩帕特羅（Jose Luis RODRIGUEZ ZAPATERO）都親自致函要求菲律賓最高法院重新調查此案。在歐盟不斷施加的壓力下，菲律賓政府在二○○六年宣布廢除死刑，將所有死刑囚犯改為終身監禁。

 

本片除了試圖重新省視該事件的種種疑點，為現年已三十四歲的帕可平反，更藉由敘述這樁案件，來剖析深埋在菲律賓社會中的痼疾：腐化的政治、歷史的牽絆、種族與階級間的衝突、司法系統與媒體的複雜生態。

 

As a tropical storm beats down on the Philippine island of Cebu, two sisters leave work and never make it home. That same night, hundreds of miles away in Manila on a different island, Paco Larranaga, 19, is at a party, surrounded by dozens of reliable witnesses. The missing women, Marijoy, 21, and Jacqueline CHIONG, 23, are pretty and innocent Chinese-Filipinos, a group that has formed a traditional underclass. Paco, accused of their rapes and murders, is part of a prominent mestizo political clan that includes a former president. With a past of petty offenses, he neatly fits the role of privileged thug– and that is how he is cast by a frenzied media circus that swarms his arrest and trial, and cheers his eventual sentence to death by lethal injection.

 

Reflecting schisms of race, class, and political power at the core of the Philippines’ tumultuous democracy, clashing families, institutions, and individuals face off to convict or free Paco. Their irreconcilable versions of reality and justice play out in a case that ends a country’s use of capital punishment, yet fails to free an innocent man.

 

Give Up Tomorrow exposes a Kafkaesque extravaganza populated by flamboyantly corrupt public officials, drug dealers, cops on the take, and journalists in thrall to and in lonely stance against, a frenzied legal and media circus. It is also an intimate family drama focused on the near mythic struggle of two angry and sorrowful mothers who have dedicated more than a decade to executing or saving one young man.

  

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