Eternal Spring

American evangelicals like to whine about how oppressed they are, which actually translates to their inability to push their believes on others. Actual religious oppression is what has happened for decades to Falun Gong. For American audiences, it's most commonly associated with watching groups of people practice qigong (basically a slow, communal version of tai chi) in the park, and the annual visit of the Shen Yun performance troupe.

It's also a political entity, and in recent years Falun Gong's leadership has slipped from simply being an oppositional group to the Chinese Communist Party to an active proponent of far right propaganda and candidates globally.

But the violent oppression of Falun Gong has nothing to do with what it is or isn't. That brutality, with beatings, killings, mass imprisonments, disappearances, and even organ harvesting, is everything to do with the CCP's determination to smash anything that breaks with its centrally-imposed orthodoxy.

Falun Gong's very existence is an act of rebellion against Beijing, but it's one particular event that provides the background to hybrid live action/animated documentary Eternal Spring. In 2002, a group of Falun Gong practitioners hijacked the broadcast system of a TV station in the city of Changchun in the northeastern province of Jilin. After years of street corner protests and handing out CDs, the group managed to take over the state airways for 50 minutes in an attempt to, as they saw it, correct the record.

But Eternal Spring - Canada's entry into the 2022 International Oscar category - isn't just a cartoon recreation of the day and the brutal backlash that followed. It's also about Daxiong, an award-winning Chinese artist and animator who moved to New York in the wake of the hijacking. Even though he was not involved, as a Falun Gong adherent he feared being caught up in the ongoing police crackdown, and realized that awards and critical acclaim wouldn't save him from being disappeared.

Gorgeously animated in 3D in Daxiong's signature, hyperdetailed/hyperstylized artwork, Eternal Spring is a chronicle of dissidence, and Daxiong's attempts to come to terms with how the movement got to this point of non-violent resistance - an act with which he disagreed because of the backlash. Those are emotions shared with many of the interviewees - survivors, not organizers, as one notes - present or affected by the day. It's Daxiong's perspective, both as artists and bystander, that makes Eternal Spring so fascinating, as he gives faces and lives to the wide-eyed dissidents who took part in the day, and the tidal wave of brutality that struck them down. The animated recreations are interwoven with his research and design process, pulling the curtain back on his creative process as an emotional and intellectual journey. There's something of the police sketch artist about how he sketches while interviewees unload their tale, but without the hope for any kind of justice.

Eternal Spring is not a recruitment tool for Falun Gong. Indeed, its tenets are barely mentioned. Instead, it's a chronicle of what it means to be on the receiving end of real oppression, wrapped up in a crime procedural (the planning of the hijacking has all the hallmarks of a heist movie, while the fallout mixes the biographical insight of last year's Oscar-nominated Flee with the quiet sociological and political rage of Yeun Sang-ho's The King of Pigs. It's a film that demands to be seen: As one Falun Going practitioner, now exiled for fear of her life, puts it, "If you are silent in the face of persecution, and look away when people are dying, are you still human?"