(Clearwisdom.net)
After I read the articles "Music is also a Good Way to Clarify the Truth" and "A Few Thoughts on Clarifying Truth and Examples of Re-Editing Truth-Clarifying Movies," I could not agree with all of the authors' opinions. I agree with them on a few points. We all know the influence a popular song can have on ordinary people. One song can make a whole generation cry and remember that period of time. Ordinary people's responses are a good reference for us. We have many articles about remembering family, friends, and fellow practitioners who died in the persecution. Actually, thinking about it, aren't ordinary people also family, friends, hometown folks, coworkers or classmates of these practitioners? Here, I'm just conveying an idea.
If those concerts performed by Dafa disciples not only leave Dafa's beauty in a song, but also awaken the compassion in peoples' hearts, then our goal of clarifying the truth through song can better be achieved. However, to a larger extent, the results are determined by the lyrics of the songs. For example, when we write songs about the people or stories we encounter during truth-clarification, we can have a great impact on the audience. Based on this, our songs can be greatly enriched by obtaining more material from China to assist those practitioners who can write.
Right now, many of our songs are for Dafa disciples, including the very good song "Please Sit with Us." The last sentence is "together we save sentient beings," which ordinary people would not relate to. This also applies to poems I recently read on Minghui. Many of those poems are for disciples, whereas our immediate task is to save sentient beings. The song "Coming for you" is a success, because it comes from our real practice. What it expresses comes from our heart, and more importantly, ordinary people can accept and understand it. We need to better utilize poems and songs by changing our main purpose and thoughts when we write. Then, we can write beautiful and powerful songs that ordinary people can understand.
Right now, we have "Coming for You" and "Falun Dafa Is Good." There's another sound from our hearts that hasn't yet come forth, "End the Persecution." We could have another magnificent song, just like "Coming for You," which was a chorus led by people of various races and in different languages. We can bring everyone together to sing with their hearts, all together, no matter where you are, no matter who you are, if you agree that good people should not be persecuted, if you think your descendants should have the right to tell the truth, then it's time for us to come together, hand in hand, heart to heart, and end this persecution of good people in China.
I hope practitioners living in and out of China will share their thoughts on this and help expand our thoughts. This is not just the task of those practitioners who can write poems. The practitioners who don't know how to write can write down their thoughts or create a preliminary draft, which can be edited by practitioners who know how to write and edit. This way, our movies and concerts could have a greater variety of truth-clarifying material.
Movies cannot be separated from songs either. "Freedom," the famous song, added color to a Martin Luther King Jr. movie. Whenever it's sung, people think of Martin Luther King Jr. I believe that generally speaking, it's not enough if our movies or songs only help people know about the persecution of Falun Gong. It should also convey the damage done to ordinary people, the audience themselves.
Right now, many practitioners who are making movies do not understand the situation in China as well as practitioners in China, due to time constraints in producing a movie. Those practitioners with movie-editing talent often become puzzled for lack of good scripts, or they cannot write well. Therefore, the speed of production and quality of the movie cannot be guaranteed. The influence of a good movie is potentially great. What we need is not only one, but every aspect of materials available to us that can be expressed with words and could be considered in our movies.
In the past I did not pay attention to this either, just waiting for other practitioners to make movies. Later, I tried to write scripts and lyrics, and found that the most difficult part is the first step. I've never written any, so how could I? The first step is to break through our human notions. As long as we have some writing ability, and pay more attention the details of our movies based on the needs of a subject, we can organize a movie to clarify the truth. Even though it may only be a preliminary draft, it provides a tentative plan and help for the practitioners who are making the movies. Currently some practitioners are striving to create a truth-clarifying movie exposing Jiang Zemin's persecution to everyone in the world. This is to elicit global support to finally bring Jiang to justice. At the same time, many practitioners hope to create movies adapted for certain audiences, for instance, a movie that exposes the evil in a certain area or to a certain group, but it's totally dependant on the script. We hope that practitioners in and out of China can work together and share their wisdom to do a good job clarifying the truth through music and movies.
August 11, 2004