HRWFF ’22: Eternal Spring

State media only airs propaganda favorable to the regime in power, because that is its only reason for being. However, for one brief night in 2002, the local CCP-controlled TV station in Changchun broadcasted some contrary points of view. They had been hacked. As a result, comic artist Daxiong was forced to leave China, even though he was not involved. He was a Falun Gong (or Falun Dafa) practitioner, just like the signal hijackers, so he faced similarly harsh reprisals. Understandably, he had rather mixed feelings about the “hijacking,” but he came to respect the hijackers’ motivations and sacrifices while designing the animation of Jason Loftus’ documentary Eternal Spring, which screens as part of the 2022 Human Rights Watch Film Festival.

If the opening round-up scene were a live-action tracking shot rather than animation, it would have film geeks screaming comparisons to Fincher and Paul Thomas Anderson. It still will knock viewers’ socks off. Yet, it also serves an important function, illustrating the ruthlessness of the police crackdown following the broadcast signal intrusion.

In more traditionally filmed scenes, Daxiong meets with a handful of survivors now living abroad, for feedback on his rendering of the characters and the city of Changchun at that time. Eternal Spring has garnered comparisons to Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s Flee, but the animation Daxiong designs is much more stylish and the true story Loftus helps tell is far more tense and gripping. Flee looked perfectly fine, but clearly the animation began and ended in a computer, whereas viewers can easily tell Eternal Spring started with Daxiong’s pen and paper.

There are several contemporary scenes featuring Daxiong and the survivors, but the overwhelming majority of the documentary animates the planning, execution, and aftermath of the signal intrusion. We come to care about the figures involved, especially the working-class trucker appropriately dubbed “Big Truck,” even though we know they will face unjust fates. Tellingly, the one event the doc only mentions in passing is the trial itself, because why bother? It held no suspense or uncertainty.

Slamdance ’20: Ask No Questions

The world should be horrified by the evidence of genocide emerging from East Turkestan, but we shouldn’t be so surprised. To a large extent, the Chinese Communist Party is merely repeating the game-plan they used to launch their wholesale crackdown on Falun Dafa (or Falun Gong). Today, Party propaganda tells the world they are simply rotting out terrorists. In the case, of Falun Gong, it was religious extremism. Filmmakers Jason Loftus & Eric Pedicelli ask the hard questions about the incident used to justify the anti-Falun Gong campaign that the Western media should have in the riveting expose documentary, Ask No Questions, which premiered at the 2020 Slamdance Film Festival, in Park City.

Falun Dafa is a spiritual practice combining Buddhism and Taoism that is not inherently political, but its rapid growth spooked the Communism Party, so true to form, they prohibited it. Those who still practiced, were subjected to physical and mental torture in re-education camps. Whoever refused to recant became slave laborers in work camps (much like what is happening in East Turkestan).

For a while, the world expressed concern over this naked repression of Falun Gong, but the release of video tape supposedly documenting practitioners self-immolating on Tiananmen Square largely defused the issue. (In fact, the IOC rewarded the CCP for their brutality by approving China’s bid for the 2008 Olympics.) Ever since, the incident has made practitioners like Loftus defensive. Yet, when he took a hard look at the tape, he noticed some suspicious inconsistencies. CNN reporter Lisa Weaver (who happened to be on the Square at that very moment) had questions about the official story, but she was not allowed to follow-up, because CNN wanted to protect its Beijing bureau.

Throughout Ask No Questions, Loftus points out the strange circumstances surrounding the incident, starting with the fact the self-immolators had no known history of practicing Falun Dafa. He also interviews at length Chen Ruichang, a former state television official and Falun Dafa practitioner, who refused to recant despite the brutal torture he endured in a prison camp.