As a tropical storm beats down on the Philippine island of Cebu, two sisters leave work and never make it home.
That same night, 300 miles away in Manila on a different island, 19-year-old culinary student Paco Larrañaga, 19, is at a party, surrounded by dozens of reliable witnesses. The missing women, Marijoy, 21, and Jacqueline Chong, 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. One of the most sensational trials in the country’s history ensues, exposing shocking corruption within the judicial system and long-simmering class and racial antipathies among the population. Beefy and tough, 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. Against a backdrop of tabloid journalism, political intrigue and police misconduct, one mother becomes a media darling, the other waits for justice, a judge commits suicide — and the young man remains behind bars. 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 is not your usual suspense story of a man wrongly accused, and Paco Larrañaga is not your usual hero. But his very lack of facile appeal challenges his society and filmgoers to rely on facts over impressions, evidence over prejudice. Amnesty International, the government of Spain, Fair Trials International, and the United Nations are unequivocal in the belief that for more than a decade, Paco has been paying with his freedom for a crime he did not commit.

Check your local listings for the film on Thursday, October 4, 2012 at 10 pm PBS.

Give Up Tomorrow Trailer