Uyghur Blog
February 13th, 2010 |

Jeff Daniels is a 31-year-old teacher, filmmaker, and student of history. He is the writer, director and cinematographer of the documentary The 10 Conditions of Love, which is the subject of this interview.

When speaking with him, I didn’t see a man who sought controversy or commotion, I didn’t see someone whose goals were to perpetually disturb arguably the most powerful country in the world.

When I spoke with Jeff, I pictured a friend, a guy that I could see myself grabbing a beer with and not only chatting about the importance of human rights, but also things of no particular importance. In no time, I was comfortable and engaged with this gentleman from New York. I learned that he graduated from Colby College in Maine, studied history, and just happened to take a fateful trip to Beijing in 2002 that would ultimately change his life.

When I got Jeff on the phone, the first question I asked was one that I had been mulling over all week: why make a film about Ms. Rebiya Kadeer and the Uyghurs?

If you aren’t aware, the Uyghurs are a Muslim minority who live in China’s Northwest Province of Xinjiang. In 1949, this area was obtained by the newly established People’s Republic of China, the same year as Tibet, even though its population consisted of over 90% Uyghur.

The 10 Conditions of Love carries the tagline, “A love story -- of a woman, a man, a family, a people and a homeland. It is the story of Rebiya Kadeer, China’s nightmare. To her people she is a leader; to China she is a terrorist.”  

To this question he referenced the Beijing trip, and a conversation he had while there. It turns out that a friend of his had recently noticed that one of his English language students happened to be Uyghur, and when being asked questions, the student seemed tense and told the teacher that he should do his own research regarding his people.

This is when Jeff and his friend decided to take a four-day train ride into the Xinjiang Province of China to investigate for themselves. Jeff never would have guessed what they were about to find nearly 1400 miles away.

For a person that had never been to China before, his fearlessness and sincere curiosity to explore the deserts and mountains that are Xinjiang took me aback. He confided that before his trip, he didn’t even know there were Muslim people in China.

In describing Xinjiang, he said that, “when you go out to Western China, and you are absolutely in a different world, the people really look more Persian than Chinese. They speak a completely different language that is in no way related to either Mandarin or Cantonese. They eat differently, they are a Muslim people so they don’t eat pork, and the cultural practices are completely different. They don’t have the same bartering system like in the Chinese markets where you are bartering down, it’s based on respect and sitting down and having tea and melon and then having a discussion about what you are buying after talking about your family and where you come from.”

After leaving Xinjiang, Jeff began doing the legwork for the film we know as The 10 Conditions of Love. He “started doing more research and saw that the Chinese were really trying to frame the Uyghurs’ demand for equal rights and for equal representations, in their own land, as a threat to Chinese sovereignty. It was portrayed to the West as China’s own battle in a global war on terrorism.”

It didn’t stop there. He went on to say that, “The more we looked into it, the more we saw that pretty much the only voice for the Uyghur coming out of China was the Chinese government.”

The storyboard was relatively clear to Jeff, yet he had significant hurdles to overcome. His goal was to make a film, in China, about a people who are oppressed and tightly monitored. He said that he initially tried to meet with Uyghur exiles in the United States, although it wasn’t as simple as it sounds.

To this he expounded, “It took me a few years to gain their trust because many people, like me, claiming to be journalists and filmmakers, end up being spies, they believed for the Chinese government. There was a lot of wariness and mistrust but eventually they trusted me enough to introduce me to Rebiya Kadeer when she was released from prison in 2005. It was then that I felt I had a human story to tell instead of just a short news story. I actually had a story of someone who embodied her people’s story through her own riveting life.”

In 2007, there were nearly 1,000 political prisoners in China, and the number has increased as China has cracked down on the three “evil forces” of terrorism, separatism and extremism. Jeff understood that the making of his film could carry significant consequences.

“In order to gain the trust of the Uyghur exiles in the United States and England, I explained to them that I wasn’t going to be interviewing Uyghur people in China. Other people had done that, and the story became not about the Uyghur, but about how the people they were interviewing suddenly disappeared. Their arrest was perhaps because they were sharing state secrets with the enemy (the US), which is how they explained Rebiya’s imprisonment. I just felt it was unethical for me as a film maker, as a human being, to put these Uyghur in this position…”

With great intrigue, I asked Jeff how he kept safe while shooting the film in China. He told me that he sought advice, and was lucky enough to have a contact that could inform him on how to efficiently maneuver within a politically volatile region.

“I made sure to stick with friends, I never traveled alone, I was always with someone who was able to translate for me, as well as offer a bit of security. And I was stopped frequently by the police as well as plain clothed policemen, or at least people claiming to be the police. I practiced a way to quickly change the tapes so what I had to show was basically tourist footage.”

When understanding the risk, commitment and thought that went into this film, it can be better explained as a meaningful force that carries the story of a people. The end result is a creative work that has the ability to invoke great fear amidst Chinese leadership.

This fear materialized during the 2009 Melbourne Film Festival. The 10 Conditions of Love was set to screen for the first time, and in one day, the festival received over 75,000 hits from Chinese hackers. Jeff said that they “received email threats, phone threats and even death threats. Some of them felt that they were being followed and photographed.”

This behavior is unexplained and inexcusable. If legitimate claims exist against the Uyghurs, China should be willing to have an open discussion on the context of the problem and the nature of the solution.

The threats are not just of a physical nature; it seems that corporations are kowtowing to the fear of retribution from China by associating with this film. There are several instances where this is the case. Most recently, it involved Australia’s national broadcaster. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation bought the rights to The 10 Conditions of Love, and scheduled to broadcast it last December. For whatever reason, they have chosen not to air the film, and it is rumored that they are letting the Uyghur issue “cool down” before moving forward with the film.

In addition to this, Jeff has not yet found a single film festival within the United States that is willing to accept his film. He notes that they “have received invitations from film festivals around the world and then mysteriously they revoke the invitation. Some have actually been honest with us and said, listen, our film festival is sponsored by a company that sells a lot of materials to the Chinese government or actually sponsored by the Chinese government itself and we just can’t take that risk or we are embarrassed but we hope you understand that we can’t invite you to our film festival.”

Here in lies one of the fundamental issues with gaining momentum for the human rights movement in China. On an economic standpoint alone, there is not a single government that can afford to hold China accountable to international agreements such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

However, films like The 10 Conditions of Love can bring the issue, which is not just a Uyghur issue, but a China issue, to light. It has the ability to fundamentally impact nine million Uyghurs, and ultimately change the standards for 1.3 billion Chinese.

Jeff says that he’s “glad that the film allows people to start talking about who the Uyghur are because when you are aware that a people exist, there is some sense of responsibility that you have to learn more about them, to keep up with where they are now, and what is going on. If you know that they exist they become more important, more real. Where if you don’t know about them, they become more vulnerable, especially when they are in a country where they don’t have a voice. I think that is what I‘m most proud of with this film, it actually brings more awareness to a people that most people have never heard of and would otherwise not care about.”

As Jeff said, film is an opportunity to actually give a voice to the voiceless. News articles and blogs can quote and address certain issues, but nothing is as potentially powerful as seeing and hearing the story come from those who have experienced it themselves.

This is why it is important that everyone see this film. Unfortunately you cannot go to your local film festival to watch it, but you will be able to purchase it at the end of February on Amazon.com, and I encourage you to do so… you won’t regret it.

To close the interview, I asked why Jeff chose the title, The 10 Conditions of Love. He said it was because he felt it embodied much of what the film is about. He explained that after a bitter divorce with her first husband because of her efforts to raise money to support her kids, Ms. Kadeer wrote 10 “conditions” that her next husband would have to possess. They seem like a reasonable request of a partner to a woman who has the tenacity to take on the Chinese government.

They are:

1. He must be patriotic.

2. He must be moral.

3. He must have an university education in literature.

4. There must be around two year age difference.

5. It must be love at first sight.

6. He must have gone to prison for his beliefs.

7. We must truly love each other.

8. He must be loyal.

9. We must fight for the same goal.

10. He must sacrifice himself for the good of our people.

Are these “conditions” too extreme? Or did Ms. Kadeer find the one for her?

Find the answer to this, and many other questions you may have about Rebiya Kadeer and the Uyghurs, in the film The 10 Conditions of Love.