Award-Winning Film on Forced Organ Harvesting in China Now Free to Watch

Forced organ harvesting in China.
A still image of a street poster from the documentary film 'Hard to Believe.' (Image: via Vimeo)

An award-winning documentary about forced organ harvesting in China can now be watched for free online. The team at Swoop Films has made Hard to Believe available in response to the pandemic now sweeping the world — one now being labeled by Nspirement as the ‘CCP virus’ due to the regime’s coverups and corruption that created the current global crisis.

“In these troubling times we grow to appreciate the importance of accurate information. We are still not getting that from China,” read an online statement from Swoop Films.

“Foreign journalists have been expelled from the country, leaving us to speculate what exactly they still have to hide. Chinese sources on the ground are giving a very different picture to the official propaganda,” their statement said.

“We’ve seen how bad it can get. We’ve been investigating China’s complete disregard for the sanctity of human life for years,” they added.

“Today, as we all bunker down as a result of the Communist Party’s failure to contain this virus, we are making available our award-winning documentary Hard to Believe free for all to watch and share.”

First screened in 2015, the 56-minute documentary was shown at international film festivals and was broadcast on PBS. It then became available on various pay-for-view digital platforms.

‘Hard to Believe’ movie about forced organ harvesting

The core of the film focuses on the lack of media attention given to forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience in China since the first serious reports surfaced on it in 2006.

“This is a crime the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) would like to keep hidden at all costs. It is a significant factor in why the CCP has not allowed the international medical community in to help stop the spread of the coronavirus,” the filmmakers said.

Hard to Believe movie about forced organ harvesting in China.
‘Hard to Believe’ movie about forced organ harvesting in China. (Image: via Hard to Believe)

Hard to Believe’s Emmy Award-winning director Ken Stone said in 2015 that he hadn’t even heard of the term “live organ harvesting” before the filmmaking process began.

“I was pretty skeptical when I was first approached to do a documentary about it,” Stone said in a statement.

“When I saw all the information about allegations that prisoners of conscience have been killed so their organs could be transplanted, I realized I had stumbled on a gruesome murder mystery: Tens of thousands of murders may have been committed, and the mystery is that so few people are paying attention,” he said.

‘Unmatched wickedness’

The makers of Hard to Believe said that information from the film was used as evidence in the recent China Tribunal that investigated the allegations that have grown. Based on a year-long investigation, the tribunal’s judgment found that the claims were true.

“Forced organ harvesting has been committed for years throughout China on a significant scale and that Falun Gong practitioners have been one — and probably the main — source of organ supply,” said former international war crimes prosecutor Sir Geoffrey Nice QC in London on June 17, 2019, as he delivered the tribunal’s judgment.

Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual discipline based on meditation and slow-moving exercises, with practitioners following three main principles: Truthfulness, Compassion, and Tolerance.

It began in northern China during the early 1990s. Easy to learn and free, it quickly spread through China and beyond its borders. Due to the practice’s popularity, the Chinese communist state began to persecute Falun Gong practitioners in 1999.

A Falun Gong practitioner holds up a banner saying 'Truthfulness, Compassion, Tolerance' in China.
A Falun Gong practitioner holds up a banner saying ‘Truthfulness, Compassion, Tolerance’ in China. (Image: via Minghui.org)

The tribunal said that the persecuted Uyghurs were also at risk.

“The concerted persecution and medical testing of the Uyghurs is more recent, and it may be that evidence of forced organ harvesting of this group may emerge in due course,” it said.

The tribunal concluded that forced organ harvesting continues today.

“The tribunal notes that forced organ harvesting is of unmatched wickedness even compared — on a death-for-death basis — with the killings by mass crimes committed in the last century,” the tribunal said.

In 2016, the International Coalition to End Transplant Abuse in China released a 700-page report in mid-2016, that demonstrated the extent of forced organ harvesting in China. The report estimated that 60,000 to 100,000 organ transplants are performed annually in China.

Among the evidence used to calculate these figures was data from hospital revenues, transplantation volumes, bed utilization rates, surgical personnel, training programs, and state funding.

The report was written by Canadian researchers former MP David Kilgour, human rights lawyer David Matas, and investigative journalist Ethan Gutmann, who are all featured in Hard to Believe and who gave evidence at the tribunal.

Watch this short report on the tribunal below:

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