Documentary about medical genocide in China wins 2 Leo Awards
State organsa documentary exposing the practice of forced organ harvesting by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has won the 2023 Leo Awards in two categories.
Directed by Vancouver-based filmmaker Raymond Zhang, the film won both Best Direction and Best Music Score in the feature-length documentary category. A prize giving ceremony was held July 9 at the Hyatt Hotel in Vancouver to celebrate the winners and mark the 25th year of the award.
State Organs shows the painful experiences of two Chinese families who each saw the loss of a relative: Yun Zhang and Shawn Huang. The two, adherents of the Falun Gong spiritual practice, were “forcibly vanished” shortly after the CCP launched a ruthless persecution on July 20, 1999 to eradicate the practice.
“Their families embarked on a 20-year search [for the two people]. During this search, they uncovered the hidden crime of state-sanctioned mass abuse and forced organ harvesting. When the crimes came to light, it caused a massive awakening among the public,” said Mr. Zhang during the award ceremony: reported first by the Chinese version of The Epoch Times.
The 75-minute documentary was created after six years of extensive research and interviews with related parties. State organs previously received nominations in a number of other categories for the Leo Awards 2023including Best Feature Documentary, Best Screenwriting, Best Picture Editing and Best Sound.
prosecution
Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a practice rooted in Buddhist traditions that includes a series of five meditative exercises and moral teachings based on the principles of “truthfulness, compassion, forbearance.” After its introduction to China in 1999, the practice quickly gained widespread popularity for its health benefits. In 1999, an estimated 70 million to 100 million people in China practiced Falun Gong.
However, former Chinese leader Jiang Zemin saw Falun Gong’s popularity as a threat to the communist regime’s totalitarian rule and vowed to eradicate the practice in the country.
On April 25, 1999, thousands of Falun Gong adherents from around the country traveled to Beijing to petition the authorities against suppressing the practice. Their peaceful gathering was met with riot police armed with high-pressure water cannons and batons, resulting in dozens of arrests.
A massive operation targeting Falun Gong practitioners followed in the next two years, with incidents of arrests ranging from a few hundred to as many as 50,000, according to a report. report from 2001 by the American University of Washington College of Law.
Ms. Zhang, a Falun Gong practitioner also known by her full name Yunhe, lived in Qingdao City, China’s northeastern province of Shandong with her husband, Sonny Zou, until their family was shattered by the persecution. On July 21, 1999—barely a day after the CCP announced its campaign against Falun Gong—police raided the couple’s home and arrested Mr. Would.
While being held at a local police station, Mr. Zou was cruelly beaten and torturedsaid messages from Minghui.org, a website that documents the persecution of Falun Gong. In July 2000, Mr. Would be arbitrarily “sentenced” to three years of labor camp.
On November 4, 2000, the police informed Ms. Zhang suddenly said that her husband had become “seriously ill”. Mr. Zou was pronounced dead the next day and his body was immediately cremated without his family’s consent, and no explanation was given as to the circumstances surrounding his death. Mr. Zou was only 28 years old, leaving behind his wife and their 11-month-old daughter.
Ms. Zhang reportedly faced police harassment and surveillance for protesting her husband’s death. In February 2002, her family lost contact with her. Despite the family receiving information from various sources that Ms. Zhang was held in a detention center in Qingdao city, Chinese authorities denied, leaving her whereabouts shrouded in mystery to this day.
Mr. Huang, another central figure in the documentary, joined the petition in 1999. He was arrested in February 2000. After his release, Mr. Huang determined to dispel the CCP propaganda that demonized Falun Gong. In April 2003, he embarked on a mission to bypass a local television station to broadcast uncensored news about the CCP’s persecution of the spiritual practice. But a last phone call with his brother just before embarking on that quest was the last Mr. Huang’s family ever heard from him.
Forced organ harvesting
China’s organ harvesting industry experienced exponential growth in the early 2000s, concurrent with the CCP’s eradication policy against Falun Gong. Because it is a Chinese custom for bodies to remain intact after death, the country only started a pilot organ donation system in 2010, calling into question the sources of the massive amount of organs used in the burgeoning transplant business.
In 2006, Winnipeg-based human rights lawyer David Matas and the late former Canadian MP and cabinet minister David Kilgour released a groundbreaking report:Bloody harvestconcluding that the Chinese regime was involved in the large-scale forced organ harvesting of Falun Gong prisoners of conscience. The report was later published as a book of the same name in 2009.
The film “State organspresents the testimonies of the families and friends of the hundreds and thousands of Falun Gong practitioners who have been subjected to the brutality of the communist regime, with many eventually falling victim to forced organ harvesting.
