Vancouver director to be honoured
Documentary tells story of prisoners in China being killed for their organs
A documentary about China’s illegal organ harvesting industry, directed by Vancouver filmmaker Leon Lee, has won a Peabody Award.
Human Harvest follows Canadian Nobel Peace Prize nominees David Matas and David Kilgour as they investigate reports of how state-run hospitals in China have killed tens of thousands of prisoners of conscience, mainly Falun Gong practitioners, to harvest and sell their organs.
Falun Gong is a spiritual practice with millions of followers which combines meditation and philosophy. The Communist government banned the discipline in the late 1990s and imprisoned thousands of practitioners.
The evidence uncovered by the investigators suggests that between 40,000 and 65,000 Falun Gong practitioners have been killed to supply an illegal organ transplant industry worth billions of dollars a year, said Lee in an interview.
The film documents the nightmarish ordeal that prisoners have endured, as well as the torture and suffering as they had their organs removed while they were still alive, and without anesthetic, according to witnesses.
Lee interviewed organ recipients, Falun Gong prisoners and witnesses, including chilling phone conversations of doctors admitting they have organs from Falun Gong practitioners. One witness included a surgeon, who claimed to have performed an organ transplant in the 1990s on an executed prisoner who was shot to the right of the chest so the person was still alive when the kidneys were removed.
Recently released Falun Gong practitioners also testified that the government is still doing blood screening on all prisoners, which makes investigators suspicious that the harvesting continues, said Lee.
Many of the organ recipients from overseas waited only two weeks from the time they filled out applications to receiving organs, he said.
“To find a matching organ without coming from a relative in such a short time frame, the only logical conclusion is that there is a large, live organ bank that anybody can just come and find a match and get an organ.”
It was heartbreaking for Lee to interview transplant recipients after they learned about where the organs may have come from, and he said they told him they would have rather died.
China announced earlier this year that it would stop harvesting the organs of executed prisoners, but Lee said he is skeptical.
“In the beginning (the Chinese government) denied that they were using any organs from executed prisoners, and then they changed position. So they did respond to the international pressure, but we haven’t really seen any progress. To stop this we need to bring those who committed these crimes to justice.”
The United Nations, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have expressed their concerns over the allegations of organ harvesting in China, but Lee said international agencies are limited in what they can do because there’s no smoking gun.
Lee first read about the allegations of organ harvesting in China in 2006 in a report titled Bloody Harvest by David Matas and David Kilgour.
“I didn’t have any problems when we were filming, but when I first heard about this I couldn’t sleep. I just couldn’t conceptualize or understand it. I thought, I can’t make a film about this. But then I realized, what if it’s true?”
The film will be released in Canada this summer. Lee is also in post-production for The Bleeding Edge, a film about a Western heart recipient who learns the donor was murdered.
The Peabody Awards, which do not include a cash prize, were established in 1940 to recognize distinguished achievement and excellence in broadcast and media production.
The 74th annual Peabody Awards will be hosted by Fred Armisen on May 31 in New York and televised on Pivot TV.