WASHINGTON—Until the day the event was held, it was unclear whether the lead actress of the tech-thriller set in China, “The Bleeding Edge,” which saw its U.S. premier on Dec. 14, was going to be able to attend.
Anastasia Lin, the actress and simultaneously Miss World Canada 2016, had not been given permission to attend by the organization sponsoring the pageant, which has business ties to China. The film was ultimately held without adverse event, but the pressure put on the star of the film echoes conditions that crew faced throughout the production.
Leon Lee, the director, said the biggest challenge in making the film was the casting. It was hard to find male Chinese actors who would work, he said. Under the communist regime currently ruling China, an aspiring actor wanting to advance his career and someday break into the large China film market would not choose to act in this movie.
The reason is fairly clear: The Bleeding Edge depicts the extensive government surveillance of the Chinese people, as well as the regime’s complicity in the crime of forced harvesting of organs. When actors were told the plot, they wavered. “Some backed out even after signing a contract,” Lee said.
Lee was speaking at Landmark E Street Cinema on Wednesday, at the event sponsored by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. He and Lin, who plays a wife, mother, and Falun Gong practitioner in the film, took questions after it was screened.
Lin, 26, is representing Canada in the Miss World beauty pageant for the second time, because she was blocked from participating in the international competition the first time she won the Canada title. It was held in China, and the Chinese authorities would not issue her a visa, declaring her persona non grata. To make up for it, this year the Miss World Organization invited her to represent her country again. Media pressure and negative publicity about efforts to prevent the actress from speaking to the press, and attending the premier, encouraged the pageant organizers to allow her attendance.
Lin was born in China and left when she was 13. Her mother moved with her to Canada to bring her up outside the influence of the communist government. After leaving China, Lin says she came to understand how the Communist Party had lied and indoctrinated her as a child.
Story of Torture
The story of the film is about two protagonists in 2005 Shanghai, whose lives connect. One is Falun Gong practitioner Chen Jing (Anastasia Lin), who with her husband is active in reaching out to ordinary Chinese about the truth behind the Communist Party’s persecution of Falun Gong. It is dangerous work because of the ban on the practice and the widespread indoctrination by the state which has turned most ordinary Chinese against it.
One day the security police come to their home, beat them, and take them away. Chen must sign a guarantee that she will not practice Falun Gong any more. When she refuses to agree, she is subject to intense torture, including by beating, electric shock, rape, forced feeding of salt, and bamboo sticks inserted under fingernails. Chen will eventually become a match (blood and tissue type) for someone in need of an organ transplant.
The movie is graphic in showing the torture frequently used against Falun Gong practitioners, but the violence is not dwelled upon. Some viewers may want to look away, however, at the scene where a living body is cut into. This film does not yet have a rating.
The other protagonist is Western technology executive James Branton (Jay Clift) whose company is providing surveillance technology that enables the state to monitor and control Chinese citizens. He suddenly suffers a heart failure and undergoes emergency surgery whereby he receives a heart transplant. Through persistent inquiry, he learns the source of the heart beating in his body is a Falun Gong practitioner who was murdered. Feeling guilty and upset, he risks his life trying to expose the crime and prevent more falling victim to it.
The movie becomes an intense thriller as the very surveillance apparatus Branton’s company installs for Chinese security is used to track him down as he tries to save Chen from organ harvesting and warn Falun Gong practitioners in Shanghai.
Lee won the Peabody Award for the 2014 documentary “Human Harvest,” which also dealt with forced organ harvesting. “After that, the crime still going on and [so] we felt we needed to do more,” he said.
“Ninety percent of the scenes are based on true events.” While the two protagonists in the film are fiction, “the storyline of this movie is the combination of testimony of real human rights abused victims,” said Lee, who cowrote the script with Drew Parker. Lee said that he talked to victims to understand what they went through.
“I also interviewed numerous victims,” said actress Lin, who herself practices Falun Gong. “How their physicality was affected when they were shocked by electronic batons, when their fingers were punctured by bamboo sticks, those were real things that happened.”
Lin stressed the mental torture. She interviewed victims who could speak calmly about gruesome pain, but when family members were harmed, “they would break down immediately,” she said. In the film, the prison warden used Chen’s daughter and mother to pressure her to sign a statement renouncing her beliefs. Lin can personally relate to that, because the Chinese Communist Party has brought pressure on her father who still resides in China. At their command, he has tried to persuade his daughter to stop speaking out about human rights.
A Crime Not Yet History
The crime of pillaging organs from prisoners of conscience — mostly Falun Gong, Uyghurs and potentially house Christians also — is not history, said Lee and Lin. Lee said that the initial estimates of the number of victims of 10,000 to 11,000 per year, based on official Chinese data, were far too low. The latest research in “Bloody Harvest/ The Slaughter—An Update,” finds that the number of transplant surgeries annually in China is between 60,000 and 100,000. As many as 1.5 million surgeries have taken place since 2000.
“The number of victims is in the range of hundreds of thousands,” Lee said.
The figures were compiled from internal data in the hospitals where the transplants occur. About 700 hospitals in China are set up to do transplantation surgeries.
“This crime against humanity is known by the vast majority of Western governments,” Lee said.
