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Art of Conscience
Artistic work depicting the persecution wins awards, global acclaim: Over the past two years, multiple noteworthy films and other works of art have highlighted this on-going human rights crisis in China, and its broader implications internationally. Many have won awards at film festivals and other venues. Below are some of the most recommended literary, visual, and multimedia works of art recently produced that spotlight the persecution of Falun Gong.
Award-winning Films
UNSILENCED
Based on true events, “Unsilenced” follows university students in Beijing as their carefree days are shattered by the 1999 order that banned the spiritual practice Falun Gong in China. As the state churns out lies and starts brutally suppressing voices of dissent, they cross paths with Daniel, a cynical American reporter struggling to find meaning in his profession in the country he loves. With the risk of prison, torture, and even death looming over them, they must all make a choice: to go with their conscience and speak the truth, or to
remain silent as atrocious crimes go on behind closed doors.
More info: https://unsilencedmovie.com/
CANARIES IN A COLD WARAt the beginning of 2021, singer-songwriter and human rights activist James H. White sets out for Washington, D.C. to write a song in protest of the Beijing Winter Olympics. After hearing the gut-wrenching story of three sisters who were tortured in China, he flies across the Atlantic to talk with several experts, hoping to shed light on the stories he heard from the three sisters. The more he explores the topic, however, the more he discovers that what happened to the three sisters, and millions more like them, goes way beyond the human rights of one group, and way beyond the borders of China. The deeper he digs, the broader, and
more sinister, of a spectre is revealed to him, and one that seems to underlie everything, from COVID to media censorship, from politics to entertainment.
Featuring insights from some of the world’s leading human rights experts, lawyers, and heartbreaking interviews with those who faced, and survived, the unimaginable, James’s year-long
DEFIANCE IN THE KINGDOM OF FAKE NEWS
In the northeastern city of Changchun, China, a group of six ordinary people — including a truck driver, a food vendor, a housewife — gathered in secret to plan an extraordinary task: to break into the television broadcasting system of the most tyrannical regime on earth – that of the Chinese Communist Party. Their goal was to expose one of the gravest, state sponsored, lies in Chinese history. A single lie used to justify the persecution of millions of people. It was an event that sparked an information revolution that challenged oppressive regimes around
the world, from Beijing to Tehran, and continues to reverberate today.
UNMASKING CHINA’S GESTAPO
For more than 20 years, a shadowy security force in China has terrorized its citizenry with impunity. Some China experts call it “China’s Gestapo.” It is an extralegal security force established with the sole purpose to persecute and completely eliminate the spiritual practice of Falun Gong. At the time of its creation, up to 100 million Chinese were practicing or learning Falun Gong. Chinese officials have tried to hide its existence, but recent developments have begun to unmask this nefarious agency and in so doing, turn the tide inside China.
For more than a decade, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been systematically killing innocent people on a large scale, and extracting their vital organs to fuel a multibillion-dollar organ transplant industry. A vast majority of the victims are Falun Gong practitioners, who have been detained by the CCP simply because of their faith.
Both the United States Congress and European Parliament passed resolutions condemning this horrible crime. Israel, Spain, Italy and Taiwan all passed laws aimed at preventing their citizens from any involvement with China’s forced organ harvesting.
Most significantly, an internationally renowned expert on genocide and crimes against humanity, Sir Geoffrey Nice QC, who famously lead the prosecution against former Yugoslavian dictator Slobodan Milosevic for war crimes, chaired an independent tribunal based in London called the China Tribunal. This tribunal conducted the most thorough and substantive analysis of forced organ extraction in China to date. The tribunal’s findings, announced in June 2019, concluded that prisoners of conscience have been—and continue to be—killed in China for their organs “on a significant scale.” And that most of the victims are Falun Gong practitioners.
RAG DOLL
Although Yingying’s mother was killed in a modern day persecution and the little girl is alone on the streets of Northern China, an enchanted art form could reunite them. Enter a child’s world, where hope and imagination are more powerful than police batons or state-sponsored violence, where noble determination conquers all.
ETERNAL SPRING
In March 2002, a state TV signal in China is hacked by members of the banned spiritual group Falun Gong. Their goal is to counter the government narrative about their practice. In the aftermath, police raids sweep Changchun City, and comic book illustrator Daxiong, a Falun Gong practitioner, is forced to flee. He arrives in North America, blaming the hijacking for worsening a violent repression. But his views are challenged when he meets the lone surviving participant to have escaped China, now living in Seoul, South Korea.
Combining present-day footage with 3D animation inspired by Daxiong’s art, Eternal Spring retraces the event on its 20th anniversary, and brings to life an unprecedented story of defiance, harrowing eyewitness accounts of persecution, and an exhilarating tale of determination to speak up for political and religious freedoms, no matter the cost.
More information: https://eternalspringfilm.com/
Fine Arts Exhibitions
Exhibits of the “Art of Zhen Shan Ren” were held in cities across three continents. The exhibition has toured to over 900 cities in 50 countries worldwide, and currently features 22 pieces of artwork reflecting the meditation practice of Falun Dafa and practitioners’ unyielding spirit in face of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) persecution.
