The first Taiwanese movie based on the life story of an organ donor and his family is set to premiere next week in Taipei, a local organ donation organization said yesterday.
After a year of production and shooting, the 90-minute film, titled Crossroads of Life, will be screened next week and will feature well-known local celebrities, the Taiwan Organ Donation Association said.
“The movie is based on my elder brother, who fell off the roof while fixing a sprinkler for the family rabbit farm in 1996,” association secretary-general Jessica Wu (吳南河) said.
Wu said the accident shocked her entire family because the 39-year-old former military officer was in great health.
“He was pronounced brain dead by the hospital and we were approached with the idea of donating his organs, but we were never sure whether he wanted it or not since he never talked to us about the issue,” she said.
This situation is preventable if one expresses willingness to donate before the accident, she said, adding that carrying an organ donation card would eliminate a family’s burden of decision-making after an emergency occurs.
At least seven people benefited from her brother’s organs, gaining a heart, liver, lung, two kidneys, cornea and bones, Wu said.
However, following standard procedure, the recipients remain anonymous.
“Organ donation, without doubt, is a meaningful thing,” she said. “What we wanted to convey through this movie is that having a conversation about organ donation while you can will save your family from suffering any regret later on.”
The movie will be shown at the Taiwan Harmony Friends Church in Taipei’s Wenshan District (文山) on Thursday next week at 2pm.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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