A heart-wrenching story of two families spending 20 years searching for their missing loved ones will be available to watch from home beginning on Aug. 27.
“State Organs,” a documentary directed by Peabody Award-winner Raymond Zhang, centers around the disappearance of two Falun Gong practitioners in China, shortly after the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) launched its eradication campaign against the practice in July 1999. Their desperate families, while searching for missing relatives, uncover the horror of a state-sanctioned organ-harvesting industry that targets innocent people.
The 75-minute film will be released on Dish, iNDemand, Vubiquity, iTunes, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Hoopla, as well as Canadian digital platforms Rogers and Bell.
Zhang said he was inspired to make the documentary after speaking to Dr. Zheng Zhi, who also goes by the name George Zheng, a former resident doctor at one of China’s largest military hospitals.
“He was the first military doctor from China to be present for an organ extraction and was willing to testify. He told me ‘they don’t even provide anesthesia to the donor aka victim.’ I looked into this brave doctor’s eyes and was so deeply touched by his courage,” Zhang said, according to an Aug. 12 press release from Distribution Solutions, a California-based aggregator and downstream distributor of independent film labels in North America.
“Exposing forced organ harvesting in China was no easy thing to do. His courage inspired me to do all that I can to help spread awareness of this ongoing issue.”
In an interview with The Epoch Times last year, Dr. Zheng recalled the agony that had stayed with him since 1994, when he witnessed a living person killed by surgeons for his organs in a van guarded by armed soldiers. “It was horrifying beyond words. He was looking right at me. His eyelids were moving. He was alive,” he said, referring to the victim.
The Chinese regime’s grisly practice was still in its infancy in 1994, but it soon became a billion-dollar industry using organs harvested from prisoners of conscience. In June, David Matas, an international human rights expert, estimated that the Chinese regime may be earning about $8.9 billion a year from its practice of forced organ harvesting.
In 2019, the China Tribunal, an independent people’s tribunal in London, concluded that the Chinese regime had been forcibly harvesting organs from prisoners of conscience for years “on a substantial scale,” with Falun Gong practitioners as the primary source of human organs.
Falun Gong
Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual discipline based on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance. By 1999, the practice had become very popular in China, with 70 million to 100 million people having taken up the practice, according to official estimates.Deeming the practice’s popularity a threat to its rule, the CCP launched a nationwide persecution targeting the practice in July 1999. Since then, millions have been detained inside prisons, labor camps, and other facilities, hundreds of thousands tortured, and thousands have been documented as killed, according to statistics collected by the Falun Dafa Information Center.
Recently, Cheng Peiming, a Falun Gong practitioner, spoke out at a press event describing how he was “incredibly lucky” to have survived China’s atrocities, after a part of his liver and a portion of his lung were forcibly removed in a Chinese hospital in 2004.
‘Stop This Crime’
The documentary has won numerous awards, including two 2023 Leo Awards for Best Direction and Best Musical Score in the feature-length documentary category, an Award of Excellence at The Accolade Global Film Competition in March, and the Best Human Rights Documentary at the 2024 Manhattan Film Festival.Cindy Song, producer of the documentary, told The Epoch Times that she hopes Americans can watch the film and understand the suffering faced by ordinary families in China. “Let’s work together to stop this crime,” she added.
Song also expressed hopes that Americans could reach out to their senators to support the Falun Gong Protection Act (S.4914).
“This [legislation] can help those who don’t have a voice under the tyranny of the Chinese Communist Party and save innocent lives from being tortured and killed,” Song said.
The House passed the bipartisan legislation (H.R. 4132) in June, and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) introduced a companion version of the bill in the Senate in July.
If enacted, the legislation would require the U.S. president to provide relevant congressional committees with a list of foreign individuals who are determined to have “knowingly and directly engaged in or facilitated the involuntary harvesting of organs within the People’s Republic of China.” Those on the list would face U.S. face sanctions, such as a ban from entering the United States.
