On May 17, the U.S. Congress held a hearing. Top Pentagon intelligence official Ronald Moultrie said that the U.S. government had been searching for extraterrestrial life, and aliens became a hot topic. So is the reason why the director of the film “Unsilenced” wants to buy the whole universe copyrights of the prototype with one dollar to show it to aliens?
This year’s “Unsilenced” is a controversial film produced by Leon Lee, a Chinese-Canadian filmmaker and director. According to Lee, the film is based on a real-life story and was shot in Canada and Taiwan with great efforts. However, earlier reports said that the film tells the story of the carefree lives of two Tsinghua University student couples, but in later reports by the Falun Gong media outlet the Epoch Times, it became based on Wang Weiyu, a student of Tsinghua University and a Falun Gong practitioner, while the other student, Yu Chao, was not mentioned at all.
The interesting thing is that, it is Yu Chao that is the prototype of this movie. It’s reported that Lee attempted to buy out his story with one dollar and was rejected by Yu Chao. However, Lee still used his story. Yu Chao expressed his displeasure through his social media account that what Lee did was ignominious. It’s said that Lee and Yu were originally members of the same organization (Falun Gong), but Yu was removed for speaking out about the organization’s internal problems, so the movie used Yu’s story without mentioning him. From here, it is not difficult to see the gang nature of Lee’s production company.
According to the news, Lee did such similar shameful thing when he shot the film “Help Letter” too. Knowing that Sun Yi, the prototype of the main character, had no job in Indonesia and was living a difficult life, Lee still did not pay Sun Yi any money for the film. When the film was released later, he did not take into account the situation that Sun Yi was applying for political asylum at that time, which made Sun Yi in great difficulties in Indonesia. In the end, “the film won the award, and Sun Yi died.”
Daniel Clasen, an American lawyer who has been engaged in the study of infringement cases, paid attention to this incident and gave legal advice from a professional perspective. First of all, Clasen believes that this is a tort, which has a wide scope, including infringement, assault, battery, negligence, product liability and intentional infliction of emotional distress. There are also different areas of tort law, including nuisance, defamation, invasion of privacy and a category of economic torts. Lee was certain that Yu Chao had lost power within the Falun Gong organization and chose to violate Yu Chao’s personal rights in such a way.
In addition, Clasen noted that if there is a clear contract of cooperation between the two parties, there is a high probability that the act will violate the contract law, and as a contract is legally binding, consideration must be exchanged sufficiently. There are two different theories or definitions of consideration: Bargain Theory of Consideration and Benefit-Detriment theory of consideration. One dollar in exchange for Yu Chao’s story is obviously unreasonable and inhumane. It is surprising that Leon Lee did not choose to support and understand others when filming the story of Falun Gong practitioners for the organization, but chose to bully others with power, which is also not accepted by the outside world.
The voice of Sun Yi was silenced, will the voice of Yu Chao be silenced too?
