Yifei Wang loves breathing the air of freedom in the United States, but her heart is still in China, where her sister was beaten to death in a labour camp, despite committing no crime.
So Yifei, a former journalist for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and her family members in China embarked on a daring attempt to seek justice for her sister’s murder, even if it meant having to secretly film the labour camp’s director while demanding to see her sister’s hidden body.
The 80-minute film reveals the journey of a Chinese family, who overcome their tragic past to find the courage to stand up for their faith—which, in this movie, is the ancient Buddhist-rooted practice, Falun Gong—while enduring the communist regime’s heavy crackdown.
The main plot is woven with the story of Yifei’s brother, Leo, who was detained and tortured for 12 years in a Chinese prison. Leo has not fully recovered from the trauma even after escaping to America, but on his journey rekindles his inner strength and his resolve to tell the world about his experiences.
“Finding Courage” also reveals rare footage of a meeting with the director of the labour camp where Yifei’s sister was killed. The documentary also features exclusive interviews with former Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials, some of whom participated in the persecution and refer to themselves as “China’s walking dead.”
“The movie is extraordinary,” said Sophie York, a lecturer at the University of Notre Dame, Sydney. “I’ve been slightly traumatised watching it ... It’s so well researched and so tenderly put together.”
York said the film helps her better grasp the “barbarism” taking place in China today, praising the interviews with former CCP officials for enhancing the movie’s authenticity.
“It [the persecution] is so evil that it requires people to actually be motivated. They need to feel fortified and galvanised rather than just overwhelmed by the enormity of this horror,” she said, “It’s just horror.”
The 22-year crackdown on Falun Gong, who’s adherents follow the tenets of Truth-Compassion-Tolerance, is the longest-running persecution campaign by the Chinese government against its own people.
Viewing its growing popularity as a threat to the regime’s atheist ideology, the party ordered its eradication in 1999, using different tactics of torture and brainwashing to force the practitioners to renounce their faith.
North Korean audience Kathy Kim said she enjoyed the film’s “human spirit.”
“Although Falun Gong followers are mostly mainland Chinese, I think what they represent is about keeping human spirit strong and fighting inhumanity,” Kim said, adding that she can relate to the practitioners’ sufferings due to her background.
A former candidate for the federal seat of Parramatta in 2019, Charles Camenzuli, said the movie is “timely” as the world’s focus now is on China and its aggressive global expansion.
“I think it’s going to make people think again about the communist infiltration into all levels of life, into politics, from council to federal, into the movie theatres where it controls the production of movies,” he said.
“I feel very sorry for that family, but I realise that they are actually one of the lucky ones. They actually got out.”
Produced and distributed by New York-based Swoop Films, “Finding Courage” is the first feature-length film for Australian director, Kay Rubacek.
Rubacek said she “felt indebted to the family to tell their story in the form of a feature documentary” after Yifei’s family secretly filmed their visit to the labour camp and relayed the footage out of China to her.
“The access we gained to this story, due to the bravery of this family of survivors, astounds me to this day,” she said.
“It was their resilience that provided me the courage, as a first-time director, to traverse the difficult journey across cultural, linguistic, and political divides to interweave all the elements of this story into a single film about one family’s search for freedom and justice.”
The production team travelled to five countries and took a total of six years to finish the film, with two and a half years dedicated just to editing the film.
Finding Courage is the winner of at least 7 film festivals and has been an ‘Official Selection’ of 20 film festivals.
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