Hard To Believe

I had spent 20 years in radio and television newsrooms – and was currently well into my second decade as an independent producer and I had never heard of the term “live organ harvesting,” I had virtually no knowledge of Falun Gong, and I was pretty skeptical when I was first approached to do a documentary about it.

After some cursory research, 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.

That is the story I wanted to tell. “Hard To Believe” is not a documentary that proves, once and for all, that large scale organ harvesting has been happening in China for more than a decade. Other journalists, researchers, doctors and human rights activists have tried to do that (and, with just a bit of effort, you can judge for yourself how convincing their case is). The mystery I wanted to unravel, is why so little attention has been paid to the people trying to make the case and, more importantly, why so little attention has been paid to the testimony from tens of thousands of people who spent time in Chinese labor camps.
You may be familiar with the quote from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., writing about the civil rights era in the United States: “History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.”

One of the lessons, I think, from “Hard to Believe” is that so many good people—so many of us—haven’t just been silent, we haven’t even paid attention. I hope this film prompts a few more people to do so.

KEN STONE Director
“Hard To Believe”