The award-winning animated documentary “Eternal Spring” will premiere on June 15 at the Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, after its recent packed screenings in Poland and several major cities in the United States, including New York and San Francisco.
Depicting China’s continued repression of freedom of speech, assembly, and belief, the documentary will be featured and screened at Dances with Films—an annual independent film festival in Los Angeles—on Wednesday at 7 p.m. at the TCL Chinese 6 Theatre on the historic Hollywood Walk of Fame.
The movie is based on a true story that happened twenty years ago. A group of people hijacked a state television broadcast in China to counter the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) hateful narrative about their meditation practice, Falun Gong, which centers on values of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance.
Feeling threatened by its popularity, the CCP launched a systematic elimination campaign in 1999, resulting in millions detained inside prisons, labor camps, and other facilities and hundreds of thousands tortured while incarcerated, according to the Falun Dafa Information Center.
The 2002 broadcast interruption shocked the world and was described by CNN as “one of the Falun Gong’s most daring to date.”
In the aftermath, the participants faced severe persecution, and some paid with their lives. To date, the human rights abuses depicted in the film are still taking place in China.
Film director Jason Loftus is a Peabody Award-winning filmmaker and four-time Canadian Screen Award nominee. He is also the producer of several other acclaimed human rights movies such as Ask No Questions, The Bleeding Edge, and Human Harvest.
The 86-minute film took him about six years to finish, during which he and his family were constantly harassed by the CCP.
Loftus will be attending the premiere on Wednesday and answering questions from the audience.
Previously, the film had also been screened at film festivals in Canada, Greece, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands. The film has won the Rogers Audience Award at the Hot Docs film festival last month and two prizes at the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival in March.
For tickets, please visit Dances with Films’ official website. To watch the trailer or learn more about the movie, please visit the official website of “Eternal Spring.”
