Delaware state Senator Dave Lawson was shocked and amazed after watching the Austin Film Festival award-winning film “Unsilenced” at the Cinemark Christiana and XD in Newark, Delaware, on Jan. 24.
“I certainly felt that I was way behind what was going on when this started in 1999. And now 23 years later, this is just coming out. I’m embarrassed I didn’t know more,” he told The Epoch Times.
Based on true events, the movie follows the story of Wang, a student at a top university in China. Wang practices Falun Gong, a spiritual meditation discipline that teaches the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance. But overnight, Wang found himself an enemy of the state after the Chinese regime launched a national suppression campaign against the practice in 1999.
After watching the movie, Lawson said he felt “speechless.”
“I learned that there are some very, very vicious people,” he said. “I learned from this video of how innocent people simply because of a practice of making their lives better, became a victim of a tyrant state.”
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 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.
Lawson said the most touching part of the movie is “the strength of Wang that he stayed.” “And at the end, he knew he had to do what he had to do to make his life for his wife and daughter better. He knew if he didn’t do that, it just wasn’t right, he wasn’t following his belief. That is a strength that we don’t see today.”
Lawson thinks the director did a great job: “It was very well done.“ Lawson would recommend the film to all his legislator colleagues. “I want to be a voice and put this out,” he said. ”If you want to see how bad rulers can be, and how vicious they'll be, to step on people to get their own power to maintain their own power, you need to see this.”
Lawson feels that the wave of communism depicted in the movie that wants to control people’s minds has infiltrated America. Lawson said, “We have people making rules and regulations that have no idea what communist, Marx, or anything else is. They never had to fight for this country, they never had the education, and they lose it.” He added: “You can’t mandate things on free people unless they agree to be mandated.”
Finally, Lawson suggested people should come to see “Unsilenced.”
“Please come see the movie. It is very important. I think that it’s worth your time. It’s worth everyone’s time to understand what is happening in other parts of the world. And we think that we’re isolated from and we are not.”
