TRUE TALE OF LIFE AT MASANJIA
Film tells unbelievable story of man in Chinese labour camp
You can’t make up a story like Letter from Masanjia, which plays at the Calgary International Film Festival Sept. 22 and 23.
It’s both unbelievable and inconceivable. It has to be a documentary because the story would otherwise seem too far-fetched and contrived.
This documentary from awarding-winning Canadian filmmaker Leon Lee and co-written by Calgary-based Caylan Ford tells the story of a Chinese dissident who was imprisoned in a labour camp for almost three years because he embraced the outlawed spiritual practice of Falun Gong.
Sun Yi was sent to the infamous camp in Masanjia where he was assigned to a work detail making Halloween decorations for export to foreign countries. His job was to rub a combination of ash and water into mock Styrofoam tombstones for up to 16 hours a day. In secret, Sun Yi wrote letters detailing the conditions and torture in the camp, and he managed to hide them in several boxes of decorations.
A woman in Oregon found one of the unsigned letters and went public with it, leading to the eventual shutdown of China’s labour camp system.
The filmmaker Lee was one of the millions of people who followed this remarkable story. It held particular interest for him because, at the time, he was working on his explosive documentary Human Harvest, which exposed the Chinese practice of harvesting organs from political dissidents.
“Because of my research for Human Harvest, I knew that Masanjia was one of the most notorious labour camps in all of China. I simply had to find out who this remarkable person was who was able to bring the world’s attention to the horrors practised there,” says Lee who interviewed the Oregon woman, Julie Keith, first in 2013 and again in 2016 and 2017.
She had bought the Halloween decorations but ended up storing them for two years until her daughter wanted a birthday party with a Halloween theme. When they were going through the boxes, the letter dropped out and she read it.
“Julie had quite an effort to get the letter publicized. Government agencies were not interested. Finally, her local paper printed the story and the letter and it caused a news firestorm around the world.”
Lee says he was able to track Yi down because, while researching and getting footage for his Human Harvest documentary, he developed a network of reliable sources in China.
“Those people put me in contact with Yi but it took three years. Fortunately, Yi had seen a pirated copy of my Human Harvest and he was interested in working with me. He had actually started working on a graphic novel about his time in Masanjia. His sketches of what happened to him were the inspiration for how we show what went on in the labour camp and how the prisoners were treated and tortured.”
To reveal anything more about the documentary would diminish its amazing and powerful impact.
The film has been praised at festivals in Asia, Europe, Canada and the U.S. It has already had theatrical runs in Toronto, Vancouver and Ottawa and will play for two weeks at the Globe Cinema in October.
Letter from Masanjia had its U.S. theatrical premiere simultaneously in Los Angeles and New York on Sept. 14 where it was hailed by critics for both its subject matter and execution.