This was not your typical film premiere. The Bleeding Edge depicts the live-organ harvesting of religious dissidents by agents of the Chinese government and its reigning Communist Party—and the film’s starring actress, human-rights activist and religious dissident Anastasia Lin was allegedly almost barred from attending.
The 26-year-old Lin, who is also Miss Canada 2016, came to the theater in downtown Washington Wednesday night with reportedly reluctant permission from the Miss World Organization, a private London-based group beholden to Chinese sponsors. Lin was stunningly overdressed next to the other premiere attendees, most of us schlubby in standard work attire. While she posed for photographs and gave press statements, a gentleman waiting in line grumbled to Lin that she, in her brocade gown and surrounded by hovering hangers on, was blocking his way; she graciously moved aside. Lin wears out-of-context elegance with an easy grace—she is a beauty queen, after all.
Given the censorious caution hanging over her D.C. appearance, Lin’s late arrival was less fashionable than ominous. Headlines that day blared that she’d been “barred” from speaking freely to members of the press and blocked from attending her own film premiere—with just three hours to spare, the organization that sponsored the event, the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, received notice she would in fact make an appearance, speak to the press and join the director of The Bleeding Edge, Leon Lee, for a discussion after the screening.
Lin has used her media platform to raise awareness of an oppressed religious minority to which she belongs: the Falun Gong. The group’s organized persecution is the subject of The Bleeding Edge, and Lin plays an imprisoned practitioner. Falun Gong is a Buddhism- and Taoism-based meditational practice, officially outlawed by the Communist Party in 1999. Since then, state police have rounded up and imprisoned its practitioners by the thousands and, human-rights researchers and advocates have learned, involuntarily harvested their organs for sale.
A 2006 investigation by Canadian attorneys David Kilgour and David Matas found significant evidence that the Chinese government committed, and concealed, an extensive organ-pillaging operation—with imprisoned Falun Gong practitioners, healthier than executed criminals, its “donors.” Filmmaker Leon Lee took up their findings as fodder for his Peabody Award-winning documentary The Human Harvest.
With The Bleeding Edge, a dramatic film based in reality, he hopes to draw public attention to more than just the body count. “You can read reports, look at the numbers, but really the film helps you to emotionally understand how severe the crime is.” Just as heightened attention to the pageant’s censorship seems to have forced them to unshackle Lin’s human-rights advocacy, the film will draw public notice to an evil practice too often overlooked. The Chinese government, Lee hopes, will have no choice but to cease the violent persecution of thought criminals.
Lee said he foresees change to Chinese policy “if there’s enough public outcry, and if the western governments also do their part” to bring the issue attention. “China will realize, ‘You know what, it’s not worth it. We have to stop,'” he told THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
“Maybe there’s even stronger force for change,” he added. “But at least we’ve got to stop this crime first. Every single day people are murdered for their organs.”
Lee also said he had to “dial back” the violent torture shown in the film. “Most people will feel it’s too much.” Torture scenes in The Bleeding Edge pale in comparison orders carried out every day by state doctors and police, he said. “What’s depicted in the film is truly the tip of the iceberg. The real situation is far worse.” Most of us covered our eyes during the live extraction of the prisoner’s heart, Lin observed in her talk after the screening. But no one could have missed or would easily forget the film’s most heart-wrenching moment—the prisoner Jing’s brief, tragic reunion with her mother and daughter.
Jing and her daughter sob and cling to each other, while Jing’s mother slaps her, demanding that she renounce her Falun Gong practice: If she’d only sign a renunciation and recommitment to the glorious party, she could go home. But at what cost? Jing’s steadfast refusal, despite ceaseless violent torture, resounds unspoken. We know why she can’t sign. Her mother would see her bow to an authority that denies their fundamental humanity.
Jing’s give-me-liberty-or-give-me-death resistance, here through the lens of two mothers’ depthless despair, makes for an unforgettable cinematic moment. In the abstract, she’s a martyr to the democratic ideal. But we know that she will eventually die for her daughter.
Anastasia Lin escaped indoctrination by moving to Canada at age 13, and she hopes that she can use her fame to help liberate the Chinese. The finals of Miss World competition will take place in Washington this Sunday—and they’ll also be broadcast (but censored, Lin believes) on Chinese TV.
Last year’s Miss World finals took place in China, and Beijing denied Lin’s entry, slammed her in state news media and threatened her father‘s safety. After the film, Lin described loving devotion to family as the ultimate anti-communist expression. Abuse of dissidents’ families and the destruction of familial bonds, she said, “That is really mental torture, and it’s against the basic human instinct.”
“Communism itself is anti-human,” she said. “It [goes] against human nature and the human spirit and the very fundamental values that hold us together: family and love.” All people recognize such a deep denial of fundamental humanity, and so, Lin hopes, a personal appeal will succeed where policy fails. “To get people to care about each other again is more important than changing policy.” Ignorance is not the problem, she said. Stirring up a proportional popular, and then political, response to the murderous organ-pillaging program will require broad emotional awareness of its personal toll.
Anastasia Lin’s growing fame and Lee’s films serve this same purpose. Both seek to expose the nearness and reality of an evil consistently concealed, in which countless silent bystanders are broadly complicit. And, fortunately for the light of liberty, both the bold and fearless beauty queen and the devastating new film that her performance carries are very hard to ignore.
The Bleeding Edge is available for download on iTunes.
