“State Organs” film score composer Daryl Bennett (L) and director Raymond Zhang hold their Leo Awards during an award ceremony in Vancouver on July 9, 2023. (Courtesy of Rooyee Films)
State Organs, a documentary exposing the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) practice of forced organ harvesting, has won in two categories in the 2023 Leo Awards.
Directed by Vancouver-based filmmaker Raymond Zhang, the film won both Best Direction and Best Musical Score in the feature-length documentary category. An award ceremony was held at the Hyatt Hotel in Vancouver on July 9 to celebrate the winners and mark the 25th year of the award.
State Organs depicts the painful experiences of two Chinese families that each saw the loss of a family member—Yun Zhang and Shawn Huang. The two, adherents of the spiritual practice Falun Gong, were “forcibly disappeared” shortly after the CCP launched a brutal persecution aimed at eradicating the practice on July 20, 1999.
“Their families embarked on a 20-year search [for the two people]. During this search, they discovered the hidden crime of a state-sanctioned, large-scale abusive use and forced harvesting of organs. As the crimes were exposed, it triggered a massive awakening movement among the public,” Mr. Zhang said at the award ceremony, first reported by the Chinese version of The Epoch Times.
The poster of new documentary film "State Organs," which depicts the Chinese Communist Party's crimes of force organ harvesting and persecution of adherents of Falun Gong. (Courtesy of Rooyee Films)
The 75-minute documentary film was produced after six years of extensive research and interviews of related parties. State Organs previously received nominations in a number of other categories for the 2023 Leo Awards, including Best Feature Length Documentary, Best Screenwriting, Best Picture Editing, and Best Sound.
Persecution
Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a practice rooted in Buddhist traditions that involves a set of five meditative exercises and moral teachings based on the tenets of “truthfulness, compassion, forbearance.” After its introduction in China in 1999, the practice quickly gained widespread popularity due to its health benefits. By 1999, an estimated 70 million to 100 million people in China were practicing Falun Gong.
However, former Chinese leader Jiang Zemin saw Falun Gong’s popularity as a threat to the communist regime’s totalitarian rule, and pledged to eradicate the practice in the country.
On April 25, 1999, thousands of Falun Gong adherents from across the country travelled 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 clubs, resulting in dozens of arrests.
Over 10,000 Falun Gong practitioners went to appeal on April 25, 1999, in Beijing, China. (Minghui.org)
Over the next two years, a massive operation targeting Falun Gong practitioners ensued, with incidents involving arrests that ranged from a few hundred to up to 50,000 individuals, according to a 2001 report by the American University Washington College of Law.
Ms. Zhang, a Falun Gong practitioner who was also known by her full name Yunhe, lived in Qingdao City, China’s northeastern Shandong Province with her husband, Sonny Zou, until their family was shattered by the persecution. On July 21, 1999—merely a day after the CCP announced its campaign against Falun Gong—police raided the couple’s residence and detained Mr. Zou.
While detained at a local police station, Mr. Zou was brutally beated and tortured, according to reports from Minghui.org, a website that documents the persecution against Falun Gong. In July 2000, Mr. Zou was arbitrarily “sentenced” to three years in a labour camp.
On Nov. 4, 2000, the police suddenly informed Ms. Zhang that her husband fell “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 provided as to the circumstances surrounding his death. Mr. Zou was just 28 years old, leaving behind his wife and their 11-month-old daughter.
Ms. Zhang reportedly faced police intimidation 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 indicating Ms. Zhang was being held in a detention centre in Qingdao City, the Chinese authorities denied this, leaving her whereabouts shrouded in mystery to this day.
Mr. Huang, another central figure in the documentary, participated in the 1999 petition. He was arrested in February 2000. Following his release, Mr. Huang was resolute in dispelling the CCP’s propaganda demonizing 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 final phone call with his brother just before setting off on that quest was the last that Mr. Huang’s family ever heard from him.
Forced Organ Harvesting
China’s organ harvesting industry saw an exponential growth in the early 2000s, occurring simultaneously with the CCP’s extermination policy against Falun Gong. As it is a Chinese custom for bodies to remain intact after death, the country did not start a pilot organ donation system until 2010, calling into question the sources of the massive quantity of organs used in the burgeoning transplant business.
Former Canadian Secretary of State for Asia-Pacific David Kilgour presents a revised report about organ harvesting from Falun Gong practitioners in China, as report co-author and human rights lawyer David Matas listens in the background, on Jan. 31, 2007. (The Epoch Times)
In 2006, the Winnipeg-based human rights lawyer David Matas and the late former Canadian MP and cabinet minister David Kilgour released a ground-breaking report, “Bloody Harvest,” concluding that the Chinese regime was implicit in forced organ harvesting from Falun Gong prisoners of conscience on a large scale. The report was later published as a book of the same name in 2009.
The film “State Organs” presents the testimonies of the families and friends of the hundreds upon thousands of Falun Gong practitioners who have been subjected to the brutality of the communist regime, with many ending up as victims of the forced organ harvesting enterprise.
