Review: Eternal Spring (2022)

Like the great 2008 Israeli documentary, Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir, Eternal Spring utilizes animation to help its subjects visualize, clarify, and revisit—and thus share with others, including the audience—their memories of a significant past event. Waltz with Bashir explored Israel’s 1982 Lebanon War. Eternal Spring, written and directed by Jason Loftus, considers the hijacking, on March 5, 2002, of broadcast TV by a group of Falun Gong practitioners in the city of Changchun in northeastern China.

Eternal Spring explains that although Falun Gong emerged in China in the early 1990s, it wasn’t until 1999 that the Chinese Communist Party began to crack down on the spiritual movement, starting with negative coverage of Falun Gong in the state media. Hoping to burst the bubble of what they considered to be CCP misinformation and even demonization of Falun Gong, a small group of practitioners cut the television cables in Changchun in order to instead broadcast pro-Falun Gong material. The hijacking galvanized the CCP to more aggressively and violently persecute Falun Gong, arresting not only those associated with the incident but also Falun Gong practitioners more generally. Although Eternal Spring provides the above-mentioned context for the hijacking, I would have appreciated a bit more background and specific information about Falun Gong, such as who they are, who founded the movement, and what exactly they believe. I think audiences largely unfamiliar with the movement will come away from the film with only a vague understanding of Falun Gong.

Perhaps one reason that the film avoids large chunks of straight exposition is that Loftus, ultimately, is telling a personal story focused on the Chinese expat comic book artist, Daxiong, who now lives in Toronto, Canada. Daxiong grew up in Changchun and was already a practitioner at the time of the hijacking and crackdown in 2002, but, as he explains to the audience, he originally had a negative view of the event, seeing it as the reason for the persecution. The film follows Daxiong as he revisits and explores his memories of Changchun and the hijacking, and interviews others more involved, such as “Mr. White,” who was imprisoned but now lives in Seoul, South Korea.

At the same time, this is a personal story not only for Daxiong but also for the writer-director, Jason Loftus. Although Loftus never appears in the documentary, I was curious about him and finished the film assuming that his personal views on Falun Gong were positive. Some background research on Loftus indicates a deeper connection to the material. He previously was a producer on a 2014 documentary, Human Harvest, about organ harvesting in China (a common allegation against the CCP made by the Falun Gong, who say they are the primary targets). Loftus’s first directorial effort was 2020’s Ask No Questions, which investigates the self-immolation of Falun Gong practitioners in 2001. Was it staged? A January 25, 2020 review of Ask No Questions describes Loftus as a “longtime Falun Gong practitioner.” To be clear, I’m not suggesting that Loftus’s faith in any way impairs the documentary, just as a Christian or a Muslim or anyone else is welcome to make a faith-driven documentary. But it helps to explain the film’s approach as well as its genre.

The film begins with its most impressive visual performance, an animated single-take swooping camera, travelling through Changchun, showing numerous people trying to escape and being arrested, while Daxiong, in voice-over, relates his memories of the event. The animated camera’s freedom, as well as the somewhat stiff body movements, recall video game animation from a few years ago. Showing us both more and less than live-action could capture, the animation is a strange blend of realistic and enhanced representation, and it’s simultaneously compelling and distancing.

Although it’s not entirely clear as the film begins, we soon learn that Daxiong, being an artist, appears to be the key driver for this being an animated film. We see him looking at physical and computer models for characters, making suggestions about their facial features. In one of the film’s most memorable moments, a practitioner emotionally explains his reunion with another prisoner, and Daxiong's response is to ask for permission to draw the memory while his friend describes it. It’s a perfect moment showing how visual art can be a means to understand the memories of oneself and others. This is how Daxiong understands himself and the world, and this explains the film’s animation approach.

How effective is the visual style for the audience though? It gives Eternal Spring an otherworldly quality, making it seem both less factual and more meditative. Animation will also automatically make some audience members question the objectivity of the film as a documentary, but the foregrounding of the medium actually calls attention to the fact that all documentary is subjective, to some extent. I think it largely works, since Eternal Spring is not intended to be an objective, neutral investigation of people and events, or of Falun Gong and the CCP. But while the film is openly subjective, this isn’t to say that it is an aggressively propagandistic documentary.

The animation is certainly a driving force in the perceived uniqueness and appeal of Eternal Spring, and, as one of the most prominent features of the film, it will likely bring the work wider notoriety. Eternal Spring won the Audience Award at this spring’s Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival in Toronto, and is now the Canadian submission for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film.

Eternal Spring is also emotionally compelling. To revisit this review’s initial comparison, while Waltz with Bashair deals with the trauma of not only participating in war but also enabling a massacre, Eternal Spring is about the trauma of persecution. Here, persecution isn’t meant metaphorically or in an exaggerated sense, nor is persecution a future situation to be worried about. For the Falun Gong, it has happened, it’s ongoing, and it’s brutal. The film portrays media incitement, book burnings, police beatings, torture, imprisonments, and deaths. This background of genuine persecution also explains the film’s embrace of hagiography in the final act, relating the suffering and deaths of two imprisoned hijackers, who are essentially portrayed as martyrs for the Falun Gong faith. Again, hagiography isn’t a problem per se; most documentaries are meant to persuade, and many made today are nakedly activist. It does mean, however, that we should approach Eternal Spring with these expectations.

It’s also worth pointing out that no matter one’s view on Falun Gong, Eternal Spring is notable, both for its style and its relevant themes of state oppression of dissenting minority viewpoints. Like last year’s documentary from Hot Docs, In the Same Breath, which was about the early days of COVID-19 in China (which I also reviewed), Eternal Spring also uses actual Chinese state media statements as the starting point for its investigations. We listen to the blatant mischaracterization and even demonization of minorities and opponents. It shouldn’t need to be said that we in the West shouldn’t feel immune from such tendencies, even as we look at horror at the persecution of Falun Gong and other religious minorities by the CCP.

8 out of 10

Eternal Spring (2022, Canada)

Written and directed by Jason Loftus.

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