Eternal Spring: Canada’s Oscar Nom is a Moving But Flawed Animated Documentary
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B-
A true-life thriller and an anguished first-hand account of religious persecution in the People’s Republic Of China, the documentary Eternal Spring, is already a breakout success before its theatrical release this week.
The film won the Hot Docs Audience Award for most popular film at this year’s festival, as well as the Rogers Audience Award for most popular Canadian film. In August, the film was announced as Canada’s submission for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film.
A Falun Gong member prepares to hijack a Chinese news broadcast
Though the emotional appeal of this story of resistance to brutal repression is genuinely moving, the documentary has limitations in both style and content. A collaboration between Toronto director-writer Jason Loftus and the gifted Chinese-born artist known as Daxiong (real name Guo Jingxiong), Eternal Spring joins the small group of animated documentaries, including Israeli director Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir and Danish filmmaker Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s Flee, which use illustration to render memories of traumatic events.
Reconstructed memory from multiple sources is unavoidably elliptical, and Eternal Spring is particularly frustrating to follow. The narrative hopscotches around a 20-year-old event, the hijacking of a Chinese television broadcast by members of the Falun Gong on March 5, 2002.
The group interrupted the evening news to air a video aimed at counteracting the government’s hostile propaganda, with a positive video about the movement’s benefits and popularity and a simple assertion that “Falun Gong is good.”
The hijacking took place in the city of Changchun (which translates as the film’s title, Eternal Spring) in Northeast China, where the Falun Gong religious movement was introduced by its leader, Li Hongzhi, in the early ‘90s.
Throughout the film, the time stamp jumps from “two weeks after” to “eight years before,” mixing interviews, archival footage and animation, with side-trips into childhood memories. The film begins shortly after the hijacking, with an animated account of the Chinese police, described in in voice-over by three of the participants. We see the police breaking into apartments, beating, torturing and dragging suspects in bloody streaks across the floor.
From there we jump to contemporary Toronto, Canada. We see director Loftus and Chinese artist-in-exile, Daxiong in consultation over story-boards. Before we can settle in, we jump back to eight years prior to the hijacking. Back then, Daixong had his first encounter with Falun Gong members exercising in a park full of blossoming cherry trees, where he discovered a spiritual path to moral and physical self-improvement.
The film sketches in some of the background of the Falun Gong movement, which was founded by Li Hongzhi in the early ‘90s, and combines elements of Taoism along with Buddhist meditation, slow movement exercises, regulated breathing, and virtuous behaviour.
Falun Gong emerged during a period when a range of traditional meditation and exercises were encouraged by the Chinese government. But from the mid-‘90s onward, Falun Gong followers became targets of persecution and hostile propaganda from the state. The movement was outlawed in 1999 with members being abducted, tortured and held in forced labour camps, along with allegations of murder for organ harvesting.
The second strand of the film’s narrative is an investigative story (here the time frame is vague), in which Daxiong travels to Seoul, South Korea, to meet with Mr. White (aka Jin Xuzhe), the only one of the hijackers who managed to be released from jail.
There, Daixong learns about the hijacking’s mastermind, Liang Zhenxing. Next, Daxiong travels to New York, to interview other Falung Gong members in exile, for first-person accounts of Liang and the team he assembled.
The story finally coheres around the half-way mark of the 80-minute film, as we are introduced to the hijackers, a team of specialists of a kind familiar from Hollywood movies. There’s Lei Ming, the fast runner, Zhang Wen, the electrician, and Auntie Zhou, the “Guardian”: The sense of tension and excitement continues through the account of the period of preparation (practicing climbing telephone poles), the last-minute fears and the triumphant broadcast.
The film’s narrative control is at its strongest as it transitions from the triumphant hijacking, to the subsequent brutal crackdown, and the martyrdom of the hijackers in a story which stokes both grief and outrage.
Disappointingly, if not surprisingly, Eternal Spring provides an anodyne, selective picture of Falun Gong, with little mention of its eccentric founder, Li Hongzhi, who moved to the United States in 1998. There he established several Falung Gong promotional entities (The Epoch Times, New Tang Dynasty Television and the Shen Yun dance troupe).
In-depth stories in The New York Times and Newsweek have reported on Li’s notions of demonic aliens among us and Falun Gong’s far-right platform on race, abortion and LGBT rights. More recently, the organization has become a conduit for right-wing misinformation, including election fraud and COVID conspiracy theories to support Donald Trump and attack the Chinese government.
Of course, the right to hold screwy beliefs is a cornerstone of a free society. As recounted in Amelia Pang’s 2021 book about Chinese forced labour camps, Made In China, the membership of Falun Gong, as with many religions, includes a wide range of fundamentalists and moderates. Whatever their original motives, they were collectively “driven into the category of becoming political dissidents” by the Chinese government’s violent suppression.
Eternal Spring. Written and directed by Jason Loftus, based on the animation of Daxiong. The film will be released theatrically on Sept. 23 in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver.