Diana Means, host of Visionary Voices goes behind the scenes into the making of our latest film "Finding Courage" with Director Kay Rubacek. Check it out HERE!
Transcript:
From the Alliance of Women Filmmakers, this is Visionary Voices, behind the scenes conversations with groundbreaking women and non-binary filmmakers from around the world. I'm Diana Means.
Hello, everyone, and thanks for tuning in. Today we have Director Kay Rubacek, talking about her film Finding Courage, which is an official selection in the Los Angeles Women's International Film Festival. In Finding Courage, former journalist for the Chinese Communist Party Yifei Wang, living in exile in San Francisco, struggles to settle into America while working to heal her family's wounds. Here is a brief clip from the movie. [movie trailer]
Diana Means: Kay, welcome to the show.
Kay Rubacek: So glad to be here. Thank you.
D: Your transition into filmmaking and writing on China-related issues has a very interesting back ground to it. Can you share your story of transition?
K: Well, I started in fine arts, I was a major in drawing and sculpture. This is in Australia. And I went into production after that. And because I'm also a musician, and I was doing video games at the time for educational programming for children, and I just found this is a fantastic format to be able to use moving pictures and sound and everything. So I got right into production. And then a few years later, a meditation practice that I was doing called Falun Dafa, or Falun Gong, originated in China. It had been very, very popular and estimates had said that in China more than 70 to 100 million people were practicing, including people in the leadership over there. And suddenly it was banned. And I'd been doing it for years. And you know, it really helped my health my work, it helped my physical health and everything. And then, you know, I just couldn't understand how any country could ban something like that. It's like trying to ban yoga or running in the park. I just couldn't get it.
So I decided to go to China. And I held a banner on Tiananmen Square with a bunch of other people, and some of them were friends of mine. And we were all non-Asian. And the banner that I held had three words on it: Truth, Compassion and Tolerance. They are the principles of Falun Gong. And that was it, just three words, Truth, Compassion and Tolerance. And this is on Tiananmen Square, the heart of Beijing and China, the Capitol there.
I was absolutely mind blown. Within 30 seconds, I was beaten, pushed into a van, and then I was taken to the Tiananmen police station, and locked in a basement prison cell, literally a prison cell behind bars. Now, I knew I hadn't broken any laws, because I checked before I went. Supposedly--on paper that is--people are allowed to exercise some level of freedom of speech in China. But that wasn't the case. It was very eye opening for me. I gotta say, it really changed my life, my perspective, my respect for freedom, all these things that I'd taken for granted, growing up.
I started looking into my own history. My family escaped former communist regimes over three countries and over three generations. First, Russia, then China where my father actually was born and raised as a Russian boy, but because they could no longer stay in Russia because they would have been persecuted or killed they had to escape when communism came in there. And my husband, his family escaped, when he was seven years old, from the former Czechoslovakia for the same reason. And I started looking into all of this because I never learned anything about this in school. And so I started to use my production skills to to tell the stories, and try and help be a voice for people who don't have a voice. And in China, people who practice Falun Gong have no voice at all. They have faced an absolutely total media blackout.
It's been very eye opening. It's definitely changed the way I want to work and wanted to help share these stories. So then I started in documentary filmmaking, because it's a long form of what I was doing before I've always worked in nonfiction. And that led me to one movie and then on to the next. And this movie, Finding Courage, is my first directorial debut for a feature length documentary.
And, and just one little last note on this is, I found out that the prison cell I was in in China for that one day, the woman in our movie, Yifei Wang, who you mentioned in the introduction, she was in the same prison cell as me. But what happened to her in the same year, a few months prior to me being there, she had done the same thing. She had held a banner. But because of the color of her skin, because of her nationality, because she was Chinese, she was sent to a labor camp and tortured terribly. And I was released within 23 hours and I was deported back to Australia. But here we are, we did the same thing. And look at what happened. That's not mentioned in the film. But that was quite touching for me when I realized when we were sitting down for our first talk, and I realized we had been held in the same prison cell.
D: How did you find Yifei's story?
K: Through a friend, very fortunately. Our last movie was called Hard To Believe. Again, it was on a human rights issue in China, and we interviewed a bunch of survivors from labor camps from China. Yifei Wang was was one of many. But my friend from the Bay Area in San Francisco said to me, "Kay, you should look at this woman's story, she's got something pretty special going on." And that's what led me to ask more. Otherwise, I wouldn't have known. Because Yifei doesn't speak English. I don't speak Chinese. So we had no opportunity to just sit down like over a coffee or anything like that. But my friend said that she has a really interesting story and when I did finally sit down with a translator and her, and she gave me the trust to give us the access to make the movie that we did and to get access to her family, to undercover footage shot inside of Chinese labor camp, etc. once they got to know us. It's very hard for someone to tell their story, especially when they're at risk. They're in danger. And but she did that. So it took time, but that's how we found her story, which just touches on all aspects of persecution: media, journalism, history. It reaches all aspects. So I thought this would be a good story to use to really give us a glimpse into another world.
D: I wanted to talk a little bit more about that. Because with all documentary filmmakers, when you're telling someone else's story, you have to have their trust. And this was even, I would feel a deeper trust, because she was at risk. She's living in exile. Did it take a long time to gain that trust? To gain her family's trust?
K: It was a process. We had an advantage because of my experience in China. I could tell her what I experienced, what I saw. And then she knew, at least at some level, that I wasn't a complete outsider. I wasn't someone who wouldn't believe her.
As a documentarian, you are still a journalist, you have to really take everything with a grain of salt. You can't just take everything at face value and the information they gave to us. . I found alternate sources to back up all the info. I checked everything very, very carefully, I guess, you know, I see that as my job. But at the same time, you're balancing that relationship. This is someone's emotional experience and a very personal experience. So I had to be really sensitive to that while at the same time express that I needed to check everything she said, the good thing is that she's also a journalist. She was trained as a journalist in China and journalism was completely different to what we have here. You know, they're told that they're propaganda agents. That's what they're taught. But she had a sense when she was studying journalism that she wanted to tell people stories and wanted to report the truth. And so she does have that knowledge that we share in common that journalism is about reporting facts, investigating, checking and, and then presenting. So we were able to actually find a lot of common ground, which was great.
It just meant it took a lot of time, we just had to spend a lot of time with her.
Her brothers are also in the movie. At first her brother and family didn't want to go on camera, the brother's wife, she's a very important role in the movie. She didn't want to go on camera with us at all. But then after she watched us interviewing, doing one interview, she said, I'm willing. So we quickly said to the crew, now go, we're gonna do this now, because she didn't do another interview after that. That was it. But once we got it, she was just so sincere. And so in that moment, I knew that was all we needed.
You just have to let people speak. That's what I found. You have to let them speak so that they know that they feel heard. And even if you know a lot of that part is not going to make it into the movie, they need to know that you really heard them. So I think it really just took a lot of extra time. But I felt that was what I needed to do to be able to find the truth of the story.
D: I think your shared experience, along with her passion for telling people's stories… As a journalist helped that journey along because she knew that passion herself of telling people's stories. Can you talk a little bit about the access to the labor camp and what that was like?
K: Yifei has a sister. She has a sister who was killed in a labor camp in China, and the body is still being held. It hasn't been cremated. It's been like 18 years now. And the body is still under lock and key under control by the labor camp. It's being held at the morgue.
Now, when they told me this story, I was like, what?? I've had some crazy stories, but this was like, wow, okay, and I had to say, “go back again. Tell me again.” Then I'm like, “okay, can you prove that the bodies are there? So they produced documents from the labor camp, which I had independently translated. The documents are in Chinese.
The documents stated, we will cremate the body if you don't turn up on this day. We are going to cremate the body unless you do XYZ. They kept threatening to cremate the body, but the family kept fighting back. They have some level of status in China, which a lot of citizens just don't have. So the body is usually just immediately cremated. That's why this story is so kind of outstanding and exceptional in the way that they've been able to protect the body.
Anyway, the husband said, there's a new labor camp director at the labor camp where she was killed. We're going to go and talk to her and we're going to demand to see the body and he says, “I'm going to film it.” My co producer and I just said, “You can't do that. You just can't because it's too dangerous. I can't support that, because I just don't want that risk to you or to be associated with any danger that might happen to you.”
Basically, he said, “we're going anyway, I'm gonna do it anyway. Are you going to help me?” We agreed. We helped arrange secret cameras, glasses, and devices for recording, like a watch camera and other devices for him.
He was still able to travel between the US and Australia at that time. So we met with him in the US to prepare him for that. We were absolutely terrified about what would happen. So was his family. But he did it. He wasn't caught. He went inside the labor camp. We have this long interview, which is so telling, because it's very hard to understand that culture under a communist regime, where lying and killing and extortion is the mode of operation. To hear them speak about it so nonchalantly as if it's just like, “Yeah, this is how we do business.”
They offered a bribe on camera, you know, “we'll bribe you, we'll pay you, and then and then you be quiet and we'll let you see the body” or the labor camp director says “if you say that your sister died of natural causes, we'll let you see the body.”
This is the admission we were getting on camera when it came back. I thought about how to explain this to people so they can understand. The movie has a lot of complexities. So putting it together took us two and a half years to be able to pull all these things together in a way that could fit a narrative that us in the West could understand, looking through our lens, through our culture, our experience here, because it's very different to their experience. I really had to learn how to translate between cultures, not only between languages. So anyway, that's a long answer to your question.
D: No, that's perfect. That leads me right into my next question, which is about editing. I know as filmmakers, we capture so much, and then we have to extract the most interesting parts to form our story. You just said it took you two and a half years, which I could completely understand. I'm just like, what I can't... I can't believe these things took place. You would have to tell the story in a certain way so that the Western culture could understand it. How much footage did you have to edit through? Iis there anything that you left out that you wish you had left in?
K: We had over 100 hours of footage that is our footage, archival, and other assets that were that we got from the family. What I left out was necessary, because we expect a narrative when we watch a movie, and it's a balance between something that's engaging and entertaining, and something that's educational.
We wanted this to be a movie that would move people even if they just wanted to sit down and just watch a heartwarming film. There's tragedy, but triumph over tragedy. I left a lot out. There are some beautiful scenes that, you know, never made it in. But there's still a lot of beauty in the movie.
The biggest part that I left out, and this weighed on me for years after making the movie was that the victims in the family found her family didn't understand. They couldn't give me answers that satisfied me as to how this persecution is possible? How can it be accepted in a society of a few billion people? The answers they gave me were great, but they are answers from the victim group. I felt that if it didn't satisfy me, I didn't think that would satisfy an audience.
I needed to get another perspective so that the movie didn't come across as biased or anything like that, because this is a sensitive issue. When you talk about the Chinese Communist Party, people may say, well, it's propaganda. It's biased, I was really prepared. You know, I knew I had to count all of that and make sure that I covered all my bases. So I then went and found former Chinese Communist Party officials who were part of the persecution... A man who ran not just one, but multiple labor camps in China, specifically to persecute Falun Gong practitioners. He ran other labor camps, too. But he opened labor camps specifically for persecuting this group of people. We found him and interviewed him. We also interviewed a former judge, a Chinese judge, a former Army colonel, a former Propaganda Department official, a former secret agent, these guys that, you know, I saw as perpetrators at the beginning. But after hearing their testimonies, and getting them to trust me, that was a big process that was hard. But getting access to their stories was so life changing that it was just devastating that I could only put in a few minutes in the movie, really, because these guys, I had to tell their story. These guys helped us to understand the family's story. They give context, but it's not their story. And I had people after the movie screening say to me, “I really want to know about those guys on the black background. They're fascinating. I want to know more about them.” It was weighing on me, so I decided to turn their stories into a book because as a movie, it's really hard for them to speak, the way they speak as they really speak in this whole communist culture, they use their own words and euphemisms and language to talk about things. You really got to unpack what they're saying in each sentence, which is what I did, but I did it in writing. I did it in a book and I published it. It's called “Who are China's Walking Dead?”
One of them said, “we are the walking dead.” And I was like, “what?” I had to ask the translator, “are you translating this correctly?” He had said, “walking corpses, walking flesh,” and I thought this was horrific. “Can I translate it just as walking dead?” That's a term that we can get. She said, yeah, yeah, you can use that as a translation, that's accurate. So I started asking these other perpetrators the same thing. “Do you know this term?” And they said, “Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. 50 years ago, people were calling this… what a culture will become under communism.” They call themselves officials, not regular Chinese people. I have full respect for the Chinese people and what they're going through, and the challenges they have… absolute love and respect for them. But I found that these perpetrators were actually victims themselves. And that was the biggest realization that came out of that for me, and why I felt I needed to write the book. So that they wouldn't be seen as complicit in crimes. When you understand the context of what they went through and how they grew up, you can understand why they did what they did, but also why they left, and they chose to leave and seek another way, here in the West. They found freedom here. So yeah, that didn't make it into the movie, but it's out there now.
D: Well, I'm glad to know that there is a book because when I was watching little clips of them, I wanted to know more of their story. So the book, again, is called “Who are China's Walking Dead?” And where can you find that book?
K: Chinaswalkingdead.com is where you can get the book directly or on Amazon.
D: So a filmmaker and an author now, correct? How long did it take you to write the book after the movie? Or were you doing them simultaneously?
K: I was writing the book in my head simultaneously, I think I always wanted to write the book. Now. I don't usually tell people how long it took me to write the book. I don’t think they would believe me because when you see it, it's a 300 page book. It took a lot of work. I had a friend do a beautiful layout, images and everything. But I wrote that book in six weeks, I had to get it out of me. I basically locked myself in a room. My kids were on summer break, so they were taken care of. I said to my husband, “I just have to get this done, will you help me?” He said, Yes.
I just shut everything off. I was off social media, I was off everything. I focused and wrote each chapter as a personal essay, I started with one point and didn't know where it was going to land. I didn't know if it would even work. But it did. It's got great reviews. And there's not really anything else out there like it with this type of info because I also bring in my own experience of trying to get these guys to trust me because they are looking at this young white woman who are thinking, “you don't know anything, girl.” And every one of them even said that to me face to face. Some of them wouldn't even look me in the eye. Just getting their trust in those interviews was a really big challenge for me. And some of them I didn't, but most of them I did. And so understanding their lives, and then going back through my own history and my own family experiences… My trip to China is also in that book as well. I just wove each chapter together around one point, the environment in China, the physical pollution and things like that, the differences between the cultures. Why do we have so many copyright issues and piracy issues in China? That's a chapter and it's answered through these guys, because we say, oh, you know, China's just copying our technology, they're doing this, it actually is part of their culture. It's actually supported by the government, you got to look beyond the headlines, you got to look beyond the surface to understand why. And you see, wow, this is actually a cultural thing. And they all think that it's normal and expected.
Each chapter is one topic that I think is relevant to me as someone living in America, coming from Australia, but how can we understand the strange things that they’re telling me, you know, how can we understand them calling themselves” the Walking Dead?” I really felt such a weight came off when I finished that book. And I just had to put my head down and really focus and get it done, which I did. It's a 300 page book. And it's even got a glossary at the end with the euphemisms from the Chinese Communist Party that they were in their words, it was eye opening, but yeah, I was able to just to get it out. It was quite cathartic after.
D: Well, cathartic in a sense that I feel like everything that you would have to leave on the cutting room floor from your editing is what made it into this book. So the two of them together comprise this incredible story that you told through your film, and going back to Yifei, what is she doing today and how was her family today?
K: Her brother, who you'll see in the movie, his back was broken… terribly broken, he is healing. We had a screening last week. They actually came to the screening. After the movie, people stood and gave them a standing ovation. They don't speak English. When they watch this movie, they don't understand the narration. They've had it translated for them. They really support it. But when they see audiences moved, they are so inspired and encouraged because it's still dangerous for them. She still has a few family members back in China, that are protecting the sister's body. That's primarily why they are there, they don't want to leave it, they don't want to leave one of their family in China, they are so tight knit.
It really shows the power of family. They are just staying and waiting for their sister's body. They're still working on trying to get this story out. They're going to events and speaking to people wherever they can. But often, they really need others to speak for them. It's really hard to learn a new language. When you're getting older, you know, 50s and 60s, it's harder to learn another language. English is something that they struggle with. They're not confident to use it publicly. They just do everything they can. They're just doing everything they can, but they're doing really well.
D: What is next for you as a filmmaker?
K: For this movie, we've been shut down in a lot of places, then of course COVID. We couldn't do the theatrical tour. We're aware of film festivals that are too scared to air the movie, and we're aware of theaters that are too scared to play it.
We've had broadcasters tell us they are too scared to play it. It's been really shocking and eye opening to learn that is happening in America. The Chinese Communist Party has so many financial ties to institutions over here that they're choosing what we can and cannot see. So kudos to you guys for including the movie in your programming, because, for us, it's a story that needs to be told. We did our best to tell it.
When we find out from people, they say “it's such a good movie, we really wanted to include it in our programming or our college screening, but we have too many students from China, we have too many, you know, advertising dollars coming from China, we cannot afford it, we cannot take the risk of angering the Chinese Communist Party.”
We've even had a PR agent who sent out a press release about our movie. In 20 years, she has been a PR agent and 20 years using third party press release services for her clients. They refuse to send a press release because of our movie. She said” this, this is America, what is going on here? Who is controlling our media narrative and what we can see!” So anyway, I'm currently looking that into right now because I think there's a bigger picture going on here that may be worth telling. So I'm currently investigating the financial ties and the hold over our media and what we have access to here being controlled by a foreign power in China. So yeah, people that I talked to about it, they said that they're really shocked. But then you know when you get to the CEO level of some of these broadcasters, which we have, and they say we just can't do it… Because of that. You think, “wow, what else are they shutting down and not letting us see?”That's currently what I'm working on.
D: So very interesting that you bring that point up, because with the Los Angeles Women's International Film Festival, they forged ahead without sponsorship, because sponsors look at programming, the films with the stories that we want told rather than whether we have the sponsorship or not. It's very interesting to hear sponsors say they can't get involved with certain things because of who they're in bed with. So it was very interesting to hear that and then to hear that from a filmmaker as well. Well, Kay, thank you so much for your time and joining the show today.
K: Thank you, Diana, thank you so much for having me.
D: “Finding Courage” screens in the Los Angeles Women's International Film Festival, Sunday, March 27, at 1pm. And for the entire festival lineup, please visit lawomensfest.com