“It’s a wholly cinematic, sensory experience, with straight-ahead reportage electrified by glaring streetlights and a panicked urban wall of sound; it would make a handsome companion piece to Filipino auteur Brillante Mendoza’s recent “Alpha, the Right to Kill,” a fictionalised Duterte-era action film that aimed for grainy docu-realism as much as Jones and Sarbil’s film trades in more sleekly immersive atmospherics.

Production values here are so dazzlingly high that, for entire sequences at a time, riveted viewers may forget to wonder just how Jones and Sarbil managed to force a camera into the fray. Sarbil, a gifted cameraman who won a cinematography Emmy for his and Jones’s 2017 Frontline episode on Mosul, shoots the nighttime raids with a hot, athletic immediacy that the aforementioned Mendoza (or even Michael Mann) would covet in a fictional context; bodies are silhouetted in the glare of emergency lights, though amid the shadows, we also get close-up glimmers of strained faces on all sides of the law. The idea here is not to aestheticize a human rights crisis, but to show the absurd movie-logic shoot-’em-up that Duterte has allowed the Philippines to become, right down to the “Fury Road”-style death’s-head masks worn by the executors. Populist politics can turn all too easily to popcorn ones; “On the President’s Orders” vividly captures the tipping point.”

Guy Lodge, Variety

“Shot with the stark precision and chiaroscuro tones of a Michael Mann film, James Jones & Olivier Sarbil’s OTPO would be one of the most harrowing escapist thrillers of the year if it weren’t for the sombre realisation that the horror captured is entirely, apocalyptically real.”

POV Magazine

"A real life thriller"

One Movie Our Views

“A must-see. A film that plays like a crime thriller... If it was fiction you’d think it was something from a Scorsese film.”

Frameline

"Masterful foray into the dark side of human behaviour."

Docs On Screens

"Chilling, unflinching"

Cinema Axis

"Powerful, wrenching... visually arresting." ****

NOW Toronto

“Cinematic with a capital C”

BiffBamPop

"In this grimly lurid, thriller-like documentary, filmmakers James Jones and Olivier Sarbil have open access to both police and their victims in a town where beat cops have been promoted into death squads."

Original Cin

“Ghosts also haunt James Jones and Olivier Sarbil’s On the President’s Orders, a nail-biting investigative look at Philippines strongman Rodrigo Duterte’s deadly “war on drugs” through both its victims – the battle-scarred families of mostly low-level dealers and addicts rendered collateral damage – as well as, even more shockingly, its remorseless perpetrators.”

Filmmaker Magazine

““On the President’s Orders” is a special documentary that doesn’t try to ask all the questions or provide any possible answers. It simply testifies to our dark age of cruelty and dehumanization. Like the great documentarian duo of the Ross brothers, Jones and Sarbil exhibit great empathy by simply watching and listening to people and places, rather than telling us what to think. And, in this instance, bearing witness to the monstrous policies of the Philippine President, who asks: “’Do not do drugs and kill our children because I will kill you.’ So, what is wrong with that statement?”

God help us if we don’t know the answer.”

Roger Ebert

“On the President’s Orders looks like a thriller from the likes of Michael Mann or Christopher Nolan, and it is just as gripping as Heat (1995) or Inception (2010). This is a slick and stylish documentary, with extraordinarily high production values. This is a documentary that is worthy of your complete attention and focus. You will become immersed in this world of drugs, crime, and corruption.

On the President’s Orders is a film that Hollywood should be envious of and a film that you should definitely seek out. *****”

Filmotomy

“In this explosive cinematic investigation, directors James Jones and Olivier Sarbil get alarmingly close to the battle for the streets and soul of the Philippines. Their cameras stand before both sides — the victimised slum communities and the police squads blithely executing their countrymen from a perverse moral high ground. The staggering visions of violence, shot with a kinetic slickness and immediacy, are so electrifying that viewers will have to remind themselves: this is happening now, this is real.”

Melbourne International Film Festival

“A riveting account of the consequences of unfettered demagoguery.”

The Hollywood Reporter

“One of the most heartbreaking, harrowing pieces of journalism I’ve ever seen. Beautifully and subtly told; damning in its indictments.”

William Brangham, PBS Newshour

“A shockingly alarming investigation produced with the sensibilities of a social realist drama, Sarbil and Jones’ nonfiction warning should petrify U.S. viewers immeasurably.”

LA Times

Winner of Best UK Feature at Raindance Film Festival

Winner of Special Jury Prize at HumanDoc Film Festival

The searing story of President Duterte's bloody campaign against drug dealers and addicts in the Philippines, told with unprecedented and intimate access to both sides of the war - the Manila police, and an ordinary family from the slum.

Shot in the style of a thriller, this observational film combines the look and feel of a narrative feature film with a real life revelatory journalistic investigation into a campaign of killings.

The film uncovers a murky world where crime, drugs and politics meet in a deathly embrace - and reveal that although the police have been publicly ordered to stop extra-judicial killings, the deaths continue.

Produced and Directed by James Jones

Filmed and Directed by Olivier Sarbil

Produced by Dan Edge & Raney Aronson-Rath

Edited by Michael Harte

Production Managed by Philippa Lacey

Music composed by Uno Helmersson

FRONTLINE PBS, ARTE France, BBC Storyville and Bertha DOC SOCIETY.

onthepresidentsorders.com