Silent Harvest Aims to Break the Silence on Forced Organ Harvesting

WASHINGTON—It is the elephant in the room, hidden in plain sight for the past 20 years, a taboo topic that the Chinese Communist Party suppresses in China and beyond.It has happened on a significant scale, investigation has found, preying upon prisoners of conscience, killing them while extracting massive profits from their bodies.Forced organ harvesting, a subject thought too horrific to believe, takes center stage in a new investigative documentary that hopes to bring a change.The film “Silent Harvest: The Courage to Speak Up,”—premiered May 16 from a prestigious club in Washington—tackles the issue with medical data analysis and interviews with nearly two dozen medical experts, China analysts, and persecution survivors from China.Now, 20 years after the issue first emerged into public consciousness, it’s time to break the silence, said Torsten Trey, founder and director of Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting (DAFOH). In his eyes, silence is the “biggest accomplice to crimes against humanity.”As patients around the world face the temptation of traveling to China for a quick organ transplant surgery, they need to know that doing so could lead to the killing of an innocent life, something that could weigh on them for as long as they live, Trey said.‘A Problem of Enormous Scope’The film was 10 years in the making, debuting just shy of the 20th anniversary of DAFOH’s founding in 2006, the year whistleblowers came forward to The Epoch Times, alleging systematic slaying of detained Falun Gong practitioners in underground facilities.Hearing about it around the time, Trey was incredulous, near disbelief.“I thought, no doctor could do that. That’s beyond imagination,” he told The Epoch Times. But information kept coming out in the following months. In May 2006, Vice President of the European Parliament Edward McMillan-Scott visited Beijing on a fact finding mission, a Canadian human rights lawyer and a former Canadian cabinet official jointly conducted investigations, and then Trey met two doctors from China in Boston—all pointing to the same conclusion.Around July that year, Trey came to the conclusion that “this is real.”Torsten Trey founder and executive director of Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting speaks during the screening of the documentary “Silent Harvest: The Courage to Speak Up,” in Washington on May 16, 2026. Madalina Kilroy/The Epoch TimesWeldon Gilcrease, DAFOH’s deputy director, described going through a similar process. He went in to study the subject, hoping to prove it wasn’t happening, he said in the film.“But then when you spend enough time with the evidence and the data, which is the major driver for most people that are in medicine, you quickly become aware that this is a problem of enormous scope,” he said.The communities at risk are in the tens of millions. Falun Gong, a spiritual practice featuring truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance, had an estimated following of 70-100 million in the late 1990s, the time when the Chinese regime set out to eradicate the faith. China Tribunal in 2019 deemed the group a primary target for the abuse, but since then concerns have grown over risks spreading to Uyghurs and other persecuted minorities.In a May 14 congressional hearing, Kalbinur Sidik described noticing healthy men disappear from Xinjiang’s Uyghur detention camps where she had worked as a Chinese-language teacher. She said the detainees were getting blood draws every week before injections and white pills. She had overheard a special police officer and a driver escorting her discussing the “booming” halal organ trade, a reference to the reported targeting of Muslim ethnic minorities to market to Islamic countries.It’s a lesson that “if you don’t take a stance at something this horrific, you’re going to see it bleed through different populations,” said Gilcrease at a panel discussion following the premiere.Weldon Gilcrease, associate professor of oncology at the University of Utah School of Medicine and deputy director of Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting, speaks after the screening of the documentary “Silent Harvest: The Courage to Speak Up,” in Washington on May 16, 2026. Madalina Kilroy/The Epoch TimesThe Western medical community has trained Chinese doctors and interacted with the Chinese medical system, with the hope of bringing China to a higher ethical ground, said Gilcrease. But the Chinese regime is “a bad apple,” he said. The thinking goes that “if you have a bunch of good apples and a bad apple, it will turn the bad apple good, but what you indeed see is the opposite.”Film director Keith Wahrer, who helped bring the documentary together, said working on the project had been “eye opening.”“It is sobering, it is the kind of thing you don’t want to have to think about, but it’s important to think about,” Wahrer told The Epoch Times. “It compels me to want to do more.”He has “very little power,” he added, but one thing he can do is to spread the word and shine a light on what’s happening.The screening of the documentary “Silent Harvest: The Courage to Speak Up,” in Washington on May 16, 2026. Madalina Kilroy/The Epoch TimesOne Individual, One ActionThe premiere was the first time Gilcrease saw the documentary’s final version. Seated in the back, Gilcrease shut his eyes at one point as three images popped up on the screen, each showing a Falun Gong practitioner tortured to death with their bodies bruised and scarred.He noticed multiple other people “reeling back from it.” “I think that’s the horror that I think strikes at most of us when you first hear about the forced organ harvesting,” he said.Present in the audience were at least two medical professionals. Both said they hope the film can get out to the wider world.“I was sick to my stomach,” an ophthalmologist said during the panel discussion. He urged the film crew to make a shorter version of the documentary and submit it for the Academy Awards, saying the work is beyond anything he’s seen presented.Kathleen Leber, a Tampa-based dermatologist, noted that in America, the current awareness level on the issue is far from adequate.Having dedicated her entire life to helping others, she said, to “see such skill used for evil” makes her feel “heartbroken,” she told The Epoch Times.Kathleen Leber, dermatologist in Tampa, Fla., after watching the screening of the documentary “Silent Harvest: The Courage to Speak Up,” in Washington on May 16, 2026. Madalina Kilroy/The Epoch Times“It’s actually quite hard to put into words because it’s just such a gross violation of morality and humanity,” Leber said.Philanthropist Rebecca Dunn said the topic of organ harvesting came up recently while speaking with a friend whose husband was awaiting a kidney transplant.“You could get another kidney in China; you could probably get it in two weeks,” she recalled telling her friend. But to do so, she said, they’d “condemn someone to die—a very healthy person,” The look on her friend’s face was one of complete shock.“That’s what people need to realize, and that’s what this film is trying to tell people, that if you’re going to have this transplant, someone will be murdered, so that you can maybe extend your life.”She said she’d like people to “wake up and feel something.” Each time an organ is harvested means the death of somebody’s loved one—a mother, father, daughter, son, brother, or sister, she said.Rebecca Dunn, philanthropist and trustee of the Dunn Foundation, after watching the screening of the documentary “Silent Harvest: The Courage to Speak Up,” in Washington on May 16, 2026. Madalina Kilroy/The Epoch TimesFilmmaker and human rights activist Jason Jones said he has mailed copies of the book “Killed to Order”—by Epoch Times senior editor Jan Jekielek on the subject—to every bishop in the United States.“This is the great secret that the CCP has. Its crimes are so monstrous that they’re unbelievable,” Jones told The Epoch Times. He offered to host screenings of the film in the diocese.“We only think these things happened in the past, or in some dystopian future that might happen again, but today it’ll never happen,” he said. “Well, we live in the past, and we’re living in a dystopian future. The dystopian future is now, and the horrible past is now, and it’s happening, and this is the challenge.”Jason Jones, American film producer and human rights activist, after watching the screening of the documentary “Silent Harvest: The Courage to Speak Up,” in Washington on May 16, 2026. Madalina Kilroy/The Epoch TimesDunn is also thinking about taking action.“When you think that if just every individual who watches this film could do one thing, that one thing might save one life, that’s pretty profound,” she said. That one thing, she said, might be writing to a senator or their congressman or telling their friends over a cup of coffee.“I want to save more than one person, so I want to do a lot more than that,” she said. She added that she intends to introduce the topic to her community and “talk with many people.”“And hopefully I can make a difference.”