Superficially, it’s an arthouse issue that affects a small number of culture vultures and cineastes who won’t see a movie unless it’s got subtitles.
It’s actually one of the most compelling and alarming stories in Australia today, as it shows how the most pernicious features of a totalitarian regime have been imported into our own country. And we should all be rallying behind its victim, the Melbourne Film Festival, as it tries to defend freedom of expression and assembly in the face of intimidation on behalf of the Chinese dictatorship.
The Punch spoke last night with the director of the festival, Richard Moore, who is trying to manage this event against a backdrop of website hacking, telephone sabotage, suspected surveillance and direct threats, all from supporters of Beijing who want the festival to pull one of its movies and cancel the Melbourne visit by the woman it profiles.
“They are trying to scare us and bludgeon us into withdrawing the film and stopping her from coming…we will be monitoring the situation very closely but we do not intend to take the film out of the program,” Moore told the Punch.
The documentary is Ten Conditions of Love and it tells the story of the Uighur people through the life of exiled Uighur leader Rebiya Kadeer, formerly one of the most successful businesswomen in China, now regarded by Beijing as an enemy of the state.
Punch contributor Tracey Spicer wrote a piece about the Uighurs and Kadeer last week, which you can read here.
Kadeer is facing claims from Beijing that she is a terrorist who from afar masterminded the July 5 violence between the Uighur and the Han Chinese where almost 200 people were killed. Obviously, she denies the allegations.
For Richard Moore, what started some months ago as a diverse program of film with a strong focus on China has turned into one of the most frustrating and even frightening episodes of his life.
A total of seven Chinese movies have been cut from the program as directors pulled out for fear of being black-banned or persecuted for sharing the bill with the Uighur film, or the podium with Kadeer.
“All these people have to work and exist,” Moore says. “You can see why they did it.”
For the festival it meant the withdrawal of several thousand dollars in sponsorship cash from organisations such as the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office which was originally backing the Melbourne Film Festival. This however has been the least of the festival’s worries.
The biggest source of what Moore estimates at a loss so far of $50,000 has been through ticket sales.
Chinese nationals, or supporters of Beijing, have hacked into the festival website and tried to buy every ticket to Ten Conditions of Love to stop anyone from actually seeing it. Then, when the festival cancelled those tickets and said that only friends of the festival could buy them, they’ve discovered that some Chinese nationals had already signed up as members and were bulk-buying tickets anyway. So the festival told the public it could only buy tickets over the telephone - since then, its lines have been jammed as Beijing supporters ring in to clog up the lines.
“We have had our fax lines blocked, some of it has been quite absurd, one of them was a picture of a kangaroo saying “LOL You Stupid Kangaroos”,” Moore says.
“I was talking to one of our phone operators about the calls coming in, and he said that he’d memorised the Chinese national anthem as they keep ringing and playing it down the phone to him.
“We’ve been getting calls where it’s silent on the other end. We’ve been getting faxes which are just screeds of Chinese text. There’s been people hanging around outside the office taking photographs. Obviously the Victorian Police are involved, and we have got numbers for some of the people who have been harassing us as they come through on the fax lines and we will be trying to identify them.“
Moore says the Federal Government has been “remarkably quiet” over the situation, despite the fact that the Australian Ambassador was called before the Chinese Foreign Ministry in Beijing two days ago for an official complaint about Canberra’s decision to grant Kadeer a visa.
“I am sure that the guys in VicPol liaise with other agencies and I assume that people are talking but, look, the Government is in a difficult situation,” Moore says.
“Having granted the visa to Rebiya Kadeer they have made a statement that they are supporting her visit and effectively supporting the screening of the documentary.”
Moore stops just short of suggesting any official involvement by China in the sabotage and censorship which he, his staff and their intended audience are facing.
“All I will say is it is concerted, and what’s been disturbing is that in the past few days we are getting material from inside Australia,” he says.
“It’s a sort of faceless tactic, and it’s consistent with the type of intimidation tactics and approaches that have been taken elsewhere.”
In the past “elsewhere” has generally meant in Beijing, not in Melbourne, where the arthouse version of the rent-a-crowd ugliness at last year’s torch relay is now underway.
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