WHEN YOU ASK NO QUESTIONS…

It has been quite the time for everyone to go through this pandemic especially living in a media-driven world.  Accurate and reliable information is what many of us are striving for in order for us to make the most effective and genuine decisions for our lives.  Clickbait articles and information is readily available for all of us to consume but it is not necessarily the truth that is fed to our daily diet of the media.  It should be of no surprise that in a time of a pandemic that the struggle for genuine information for our means of survival has been nothing but propaganda.  These tactics have been used in so many life-altering times in the past century that directors Jason Loftus and Eric Pedicelli from Lofty Sky Pictures have made a documentary of a man named Chen Ruichang whose faith in the Falun Gong was decimated by the Chinese authorities.

Ask No Questions is the documentary that has come in a timely fashion especially during this pandemic.  This film will make you analyze the information that is being fed to you at this point in time in regards to COVID-19 as well as the Black Lives Matter protests.   Learning what had happened to Chen Ruichang who was an insider for Guandong TV is unbelievable.  Once he started practicing Falun Gong, he was arrested four times and while imprisoned he was force-fed state propaganda of Falun Gong participants who self-immolated themselves in Tiananmen Square.  This method was in hopes to get Chen Ruichang to drop his beliefs in the Falun Gong but rather he started to believe that all the participants who self-immolated themselves were staged.  Ask No Questions is the film that will make you question if a lot of other things that are happening today are staged or not.  FERNTV spoke to both directors Jason Loftus and Eric Pedicelli and how they got to the bottom of this matter.

FERNTV:  Tell us when you started the process of making this film and why did you select this time to go back to revisit what had happened during those Chinese suicides?

Jason: The biggest driver was hearing from people coming out of China recently and what they’d been through. We learned how extensive the impact of this event had been, and that these people were still living the consequences today. The self-immolation was a turning point in Beijing’s anti-Falun Gong campaign with the Chinese public. It was also aired extensively in Chinese detention centers in an effort to have Falun Gong adherents recant and abandon their practice. And yet there were some large unanswered questions about the event. And there were people like Chen Ruichang, a Chinese state television insider featured in our film, who was adamant that the event had been staged for political purposes. It just seemed to be something that needed to be examined more closely.

FERNTV:   Ever since you have taken the path of the Falun Gong, can you briefly explain the primary change that has happened in your life?

Jason:   Eric and I worked on this film together, but we came with different backgrounds. Eric came to the story fresh whereas I’d had a connection with Falun Gong since my last year of high school in 1998. At the time, I had this fascination with meditation and Eastern philosophy. Falun Gong emphasized looking inward and refining my character to bring it closer to the qualities of truth, compassion, and tolerance, which Falun Gong describes as the qualities of the universe. That connected with me.

The biggest change I found through Falun Gong was that it brought peace of mind and changed how I dealt with interpersonal relationships and conflicts. Both my twin sister and I were practicing and the emotional drama that’s common with teenagers went way down. My parents noticed this too. Over twenty years later, as I’ve married and built my own family, I still find these principles a source of inspiration.

FERNTV:  This story and the self-immolation incident have probably never have left you but what actually inspired you to choose the narrative that you did in this film?

Jason:   It was meeting Chen Ruichang. He’d come out of China recently and he’d been on both sides of this story. He’d worked high up in one of China’s largest state television networks, during which time he’d been responsible for helping make the state propaganda more persuasive and effective. At one point, he showed us operation manuals that he had from his time at Guangdong TV that detailed guidelines to ensure the media towed the party line. But then he’d taken up Falun Gong. And he’d endured imprisonment, abuse, and coercion as he remained adamant that the self-immolation event had been a government plot.  This contrast was fascinating, and his story is remarkable.

FERNTV:  You referenced A Clockwork Orange in your description of Ask No Questions. Why did you make this comparison?

Eric: A Clockwork Orange is a cultural touchpoint loaded with imagery of cruel brainwashing techniques. The reference is a concise way of communicating the experience of Falun Gong practitioners in Chinese re-education facilities. Detainees were monitored 24 hours a day, interrogated, and forced to watch propaganda until they capitulated and recanted their beliefs. Chen was forced to watch the state media news report on the Tiananmen Square Self Immolation for 22 days straight. They sat him in front of a TV for eight hours a day, with the volume at full blast. If he tried to look away, they held his eyes open.

This forced indoctrination is not unique to Falun Gong and similar reeducation facilities are in operation today in Northwest China. In November of 2019, a series of leaked documents (published by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists) contributed to mounting evidence that China runs secret detention camps used for ideological “education transformation”. The classified documents outline the systematic surveillance, detention without trial, and forced indoctrination of over a million Uighur Muslims and other Muslim ethnic groups in Xinjiang Province. The camps operate on a points system, where inmates earn credits for “ideological transformation” and “compliance with discipline”. The testimony of Uighurs who were detained echo those of Chen Ruichang and other Falun Gong practitioners.

FERNTV:   What was the most challenging part to make this film?

Eric: There’s a lot packed into this 80-minute film. The biggest challenge was striking the right balance between the diverse components and forming a coherent and compelling narrative that provided the necessary political context. Ask No Questions weaves Jason’s first-person investigation of the self-immolation in Tiananmen Square, critical analysis of archive footage, interviews with a CNN reporter who witnessed the event, Chen Ruichang’s detention in a re-education facility, the persecution of Falun Gong, and expert interviews. We tried to balance the intrigue of the investigation with the personal story of a man who had the strength to stand up to a giant. It was a privilege to be trusted to document Chen Ruichang’s story and I hope we did it justice.

FERNTV:   Do you feel that you see a lot of the propaganda that the Chinese government used back then similar to the propaganda they’re using now during this pandemic?

Jason: Unfortunately, a lot of the same tactics are still in place. We saw the doctors who were the early whistleblowers about the coronavirus be silenced and reprimanded. Citizen journalists who challenged the state narrative disappeared and medical researchers have been silenced as well. There is this extreme push to control the narrative and at the same time a very opaque response to questions from the international community.

As we gained a better understanding through this film of how the Chinese state media and security apparatus works, we could see strong parallels everywhere–in how the Hong Kong protest movement was being portrayed in China, how Uighur Muslims were being treated in Northwest China where they were detained in internment camps and compelled to convert. In fact, the Falun Gong community continues to suffer persecution as well, but we found the discoveries in this film are much broader and can give insights into many things that are happening in China today. 

FERNTV:  Tell us about Lofty Sky Pictures and its mission? *(This would realistically be Jason answering)

Jason: Lofty Sky Pictures is the film and TV-focused subsidiary of Lofty Sky Entertainment, which also produces animation, virtual reality, and interactive content including narrative video games. We aspire to create content that informs, educates, and inspires across a variety of platforms. On the film and TV side, we’re focused on documentaries and docuseries. Lofty Sky is based in Toronto and the company has earned four Canadian Screen Award nominations for its work as well as five Taste Awards for its culinary docuseries Confucius Was a Foodie, which airs on PBS stations in the US.\

www.asknoquestionsfilm.com

www.facebook.com/asknoquestionsdoc

IG:  @asknoquestionsdoc

Twitter:  @noquestionsdoc