ETERNAL SPRING begins its festival run at Thessaloniki Documentary Festival on March 15. Please sign up for our newsletter or follow our social media channels for updates as more festival and screening dates are added. If you’d like to inquire about hosting a screening of ETERNAL SPRING at your festival or event, please complete the contact form in the Screenings section of this website.

Unfortunately, yes. While the abuses against Falun Gong were more frequently in the news in the early days of the government’s repression of the group (for example, in a 2001 Pulitzer Prize winning series of articles by the Wall Street Journal’s Ian Johnson), the detention and abuses against those who persist in Falun Gong continues today. In fact, arrests and surveillance targeting Falun Gong believers reportedly increased in the recent lead-up to the 2022 Winter Games. What’s more, the tactics used against Falun Gong adherents—including large scale detention and coerced abandonment of religious beliefs—can also be found in the treatment of Uighur Muslims in Northwest China.

The characters in ETERNAL SPRING belong to a group known as Falun Gong. A spiritual practice in the Buddhist tradition, Falun Gong combines slow-moving exercises, meditation, and moral teachings centered on tenets of truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance. It quickly grew in popularity after its public introduction in 1992 by Changchun City local Li Hongzhi. By 1999, estimates put the number of adherents in the tens of millions, at which point Communist authorities banned the practice and commenced a repression campaign against those who persisted in it. More information on Falun Gong can be found at faluninfo.net.