After watching the premiere of the award-winning film “Unsilenced” in Auckland, New Zealand on Mar. 31, Tony Brunt, former city councilor of New Zealand’s capital, Wellington, said it is a “powerful” film that should be shown in China.
“I wish that one day this powerful film can be shown in China,” Brunt told Director Leon Lee at the Q&A panel following the screening.
“I believe our politicians need to be taking a much firmer line on Chinese human rights,” Brunt told The Epoch Times, and “while the Communist Party is sabotaging human rights, torturing, murdering, [and] imprisoning, they cannot participate as a civilized member of the world community,” adding, it should be “held to account.”
The film tells a true story of how a group of carefree friends, with promising futures at a top university in China, became outlaws risking their lives to expose the government’s propaganda and lies when the relentless persecution of Falun Gong began in 1999.
Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual practice with meditative exercises and moral principles based on truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance. According to official estimates, there were 70 million to 100 million adherents in China—more than the number reported members of the ruling Communist Party—when the persecution began.
“Control is the paramount consideration for the Chinese Communist Party,” Brunt stated. “They were losing control to a spiritual organization, an organization that that revered truth, compassion, tolerance.”
“Falun Gong, with those values, those spiritual and moral values, actually held out the opportunity for the redemption of China for the rescue of China,” he said.
According to the Falun Dafa Information Center, it’s one of the largest campaigns of religious persecution happening in the world over the past 20 plus years. Millions of innocent people in China have been fired from their jobs, expelled from school, jailed, tortured, or killed simply for practicing Falun Gong.
Director Leon Lee told audience members at the Q&A panel that many actors have voiced concerns about repercussions on “their personal safety or their professional development” during the filming in Taiwan.
“For a Chinese speaking actor or a crew member in the film industry its not surpris[ing] that many people want to develop their career one day in China,” said Lee.
However, “The very fact that this film couldn’t be made in China but could be made in Taiwan demonstrates the value in democracy.”
Presbyterian minister Stuart Vogel, who also attended the premiere, told The Epoch Times that the film shows that in an “atheist society which is totally materialistic,” Falun Gong gives people a “well coherent, well thought out, spirituality that they can practice, because it calms people.”
The screening was also attended by many Falun Gong practitioners living in New Zealand, some of whom had undergone persecution in China before moving to the island, who said they saw their experiences illustrated in “Unsilenced.”
Ms. Huang, a Falun Gong adherent, told The Epoch Times about her mother who “experienced much the same treatment as the characters in the film, where her belief is her only crime.”
“My dad was released after three years in the [labor] camps, [where he was] beaten, starved and tortured, but alive,” Huang said. However Huang’s mother passed away when Huang was two years old, as a result of the persecution.
