Manila High – life in company with death

“Hitler massacred three million Jews. Now there is three million, what is it, three million drug addicts [in the Philippines] there are. I’d be happy to slaughter them.” - President Rodrigo Roa Duterte A year after Rodrigo Duterte was elected President of the Philippines, more than 7000 people have been killed in Tokhang, the so-called ‘War on Drugs’. The victims are the country’s poorest, and nowhere has Tokhang been more devastating than in Manila’s slums where corpses are filling up the public cemeteries. Duterte still has a roaring support within the larger population. The short documentary, Manila High - Life in Company With Death, portrays four gravediggers from Pasay City Cemetery and their work constructing “Duterte Compound”, a new government-funded grave-complex for the victims of Tokhang. The gravediggers, who live on and in the cemetery’s graves, are breathing the same smog of fear creeping throughout the slums: These graves they are building could end up being their own. They’ve all lost close friends in the past year of Duterte’s ‘War on Drugs’... in the slums, everyone is a suspected drug addict. Duterte has created headlines around the world with his long list of insidious public statements. The turbulence generated by the still unresolved conflict of ISIS-rebels in the Southern Philippines causes many to fear Duterte is using Tokhang as a tool to distract public attention in a period of national instability. His latest encouragement to shoot human right’s activists can be regarded as the latest step in his yearlong dictatorial metamorphosis. The international society is still showing little signs of response.