Jason Loftus’ Eternal Spring (長春): The Heist of China’s Airwaves, which explores a daring plot by Falun Gong adherents in China to hack state television and expose brutal repression, is vying for Academy Award nominations in three categories; Doc Feature, Animated Feature and International Feature (Canada).
Since its world-premiere at the Thessaloniki Doc Fest in 2022 the film has picked up a hatful of awards, including the two top audience prizes at Hot Docs and wins at Melbourne and Reykjavik. It also won the Audience and Human Values Awards at Thessaloniki. Sideways Film is handling world sales on the Canadian production on behalf of Lofty Sky Entertainment and director/producer Loftus.
It’s 20 years now since Falun Gong activists took over a state TV station in China in a bid to counter the negative portrayal of their group [which had by then been banned] in the Chinese media. The backlash was swift and violent. Falun Gong members were arrested, tortured, sent to labour camps and even killed. Many fled the country.
One Falun Gong practitioner who arrived in North America in this period was the brilliant comic book illustrator, Daxiong.
In Jason Loftus’ Eternal Spring: The Heist Of China’s Airwaves, Daxiong looks back on the act of defiance that had such calamitous consequences for many involved. The film deliberately mixes genres. Using Daxiong’s virtuoso draughtsmanship, it recreates the TV hijack in animated form. It also includes interviews with some of the participants and an investigation into the story behind the hijack.
“There have been other documentaries that have used animation very effectively, [but] we have a character here who is part of the story,” director Loftus notes. “That adds another dimension. First of all, it adds some objectivity in the sense we know that we are interpreting it [the story] through an artist’s eyes. It’s a personal interpretation. It adds another dimension in terms of the nostalgia [for] his home, the pain of his loss and the colouring of the trauma that we see through him and his own experiences…and then the power that art has for catharsis and understanding.”
Loftus, CEO & Executive Producer at Lofty Sky Entertainment, is a Canadian producer and filmmaker who works in VR and video games as well as in filmmaking. He first encountered Daxiong when the illustrator was hired to provide comic book art for one of Lofty Sky’s narrative video games. Daxiong was based in New York and had been doing work for ‘Justice League’ and ‘Star Wars’ comics.
“We brought him up to Toronto. He was collaborating with us on this video game, and as we got to know him I realised he came from the same home town my wife had, [but] with a very different experience. She grew up with no connection to the Falun Gong community. She had no idea what the people there had endured.”
The story about the TV hijack hit home with Loftus. It was a heist caper, but one touched with tragedy and with an obvious human rights dimension. Daxiong himself clearly felt some pain and reservations about the event which had, after all, turned his own life upside down. However, he was also keen to memorialise it and to understand the event better. On another level, Loftus suggests, the film can also be seen as a love letter to Daxiong’s home town, Changchun City.
To outsiders, it is bizarre that the Chinese authorities have gone to such lengths to suppress Falun Gong, a group based around meditation, exercise and philosophy. This is not exactly a terrorist organisation. Nonetheless, Chinese propaganda have portrayed Falun Gong as sinister and socially disruptive.
Loftus had encountered the movement before the Chinese authorities started persecuting it in earnest. In his teens, he had had a fascination with meditation and eastern philosophy and had stumbled across the Falun Gong teaching.
“At that time, I had very little knowledge about Chinese politics,” Loftus says. “All the messages that I was hearing at that time [about the evils of Falun Gong] really didn’t correlate with my experiences.”
The Falun Gong movement had begun in the early 90s. The crackdown against it started in the late 90s. The authorities were deeply suspicious of the movement’s rapidly growing popularity. They saw it as threatening the communist system.
The new film picks up on some of the themes explored in Loftus’ 2020 film Ask No Questions, which he describes as a “deeper dive into the [Chinese] State media misinformation campaign around Falun Gong.”
Loftus can’t hide his admiration for the protagonists in his films who have been “willing to risk so much” just to have their stories told and to counter the propaganda from the mainstream media. “They felt speaking up was the most powerful recourse available to them. When you speak up, it disempowers the regime that wants to silence you…speaking up does make a difference.”
He himself was given a taste of the persecution they faced when he was making a kung fu video game. Reacting to his involvement with Falun Gong members, the Chinese government contacted the publishing house, telling the company to cut ties with him. There were also veiled threats to his wife’s relatives in China, he claims.
Whatever the financial and personal pressure placed on him, Loftus realised it was nothing to what the Falun Gong members were experiencing. “With the freedom that we have here in the west, I just feel that we should use that…we have to treasure what we have. That is my thought,” Loftus ends.
Back in the Autumn, VICE signed a worldwide licensing deal on the film, complemented by domestic deals with ARTE France / Germany, RTS Switzerland, VG Norway, Current Time (Russian Language, European Territories), and Al Jazeera Doc Channel (MENA). Sideways Film also confirmed a Swiss broadcast deal with SRF and theatrical deals with Joint Entertainment (Taiwan), Eurozoom (France) and Reveal (Benelux). The film opened theatrically in Canada on September 23 and at Film Forum in New York on October 14.
