Hard To Believe will have the New Zealand Premiere at Paramount Theatrein Wellington on August 16 (Tuesday), 2016, from 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM.
WATCH THE TRAILER
Host
Marama Davidson MP (Green Party spokesperson for Human Rights)
Guest speakers on panel
Ethan Gutmann (featured in the film) - Award-winning China analyst and human-rights investigator
Dr Jacob Lavee (featured in the film) - President of the Israel Transplantation Society, Director of the Heart Transplantation Unit, Deputy Director of the Department of Cardiac Surgery at the Leviev Heart Center of the Sheba Medical Center and Professor of Surgery at the Tel Aviv University Sackler Faculty of Medicine in Israel
Dr Angela Ballentyne - President of the International Association of Bioethics and the ethics member of the New Zealand Central Ethics Committee
Jaya M Gibson - Investigative Journalist & Communications Consultant who has advised NGO’s, government and private organisations in Europe, the USA, Asia & New Zealand for the last 16 years
For detailed speaker biographies please scroll down.
Co-presented by:
International Coalition to End Organ Pillaging in China (Endorganpillaging.org)
Venue address
25 Courtenay Pl, Wellington 6011, New Zealand (map)
Speaker biographies in detail
- Ethan Gutmann (featured in the film)
Ethan Gutmann, an award-winning China analyst and human-rights investigator, is the author of the award winning bookLosing the New China: A Story of American Commerce, Desire and Betrayal. He has written widely on China issues for publications such as the Wall Street Journal Asia, Investor’s Business Daily, Weekly Standard, National Review, and World Affairs Journal, and he has provided testimony and briefings to the United States Congress, the Central Intelligence Agency, the European Parliament, the International Society for Human Rights in Geneva, the United Nations, and the parliaments of Ottawa, Canberra, Dublin, Edinburgh, and London. A former foreign-policy analyst at the Brookings Institution, Gutmann has appeared on PBS, CNN, BBC, and CNBC. His most recent book is The Slaughter: Mass Killings, Organ Harvesting, and China’s Secret Solution To It’s Dissident Problem.
- Dr Jacob Lavee (featured in the film)
Dr Jacob Lavee is the Director of the Heart Transplantation Unit and Deputy Director of the Department of Cardiac Surgery at the Leviev Heart Center of the Sheba Medical Center. He is also the Professor of Surgery at the Tel Aviv University Sackler Faculty of Medicine in Israel. In 1991 he founded the Heart Transplantation Unit at the Sheba Medical Center which since has since become the largest of its kind in Israel, with over 250 heart transplantations performed to date.
He is the current President of the Israel Transplantation Society and past Chairman of the Israel Society of Cardiothoracic Surgery. He currently also serves as Chairman of the Heart and Lung Transplantation committee of Israel’s National Transplant Center, as member of the Israeli National Council of Heart and Vascular Diseases, as member of the Board of Councilors of the Declaration of Istanbul Custodian Group, as member of the Ethics Committee of The Transplantation Society and as a member of the international advisory board of the Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting (DAFOH) NGO.
Dr Lavee spearheaded the preparations of the new Israeli Organ Transplant Law and has published numerous research articles in the medical literature and co-authored an extensive textbook on the management of bleeding problems in patients undergoing open-heart operations.
- Dr Angela Ballentyne
Dr Angela Ballantyne is a Senior Lecturer in Bioethics at the University of Otago. She teaches medical ethics in the 4th and 5th year ALM program at Wellington School of Medicine. Her research interests include exploitation, research ethics, vulnerability, ethics of pregnancy and reproductive technologies, and secondary use research with clinical data.
She is President of the International Association of Bioethics and the ethics member of the New Zealand Central Ethics Committee. In 2016 she received a New Zealand Marsden Fast Start grant and a UOW Award for Best Emerging Researcher.
Angela has worked in a wide range of international settings, including Australia, England, Europe and the United States, in schools of medicine, primary health care and philosophy. She received her PhD in Bioethics from Monash University (Australia), and spent a year of her doctorate program undertaking research at Imperial College London.
Her interest in global health policy lead to a position as Technical Officer for Genetics and Ethics for the Human Genetics unit at WHO in Geneva in 2005, where she worked on projects concerning the ethical, legal and social issues associated with medical genetics.
- Jaya M Gibson
Jaya M Gibson is an investigative Journalist & Communications Consultant. He has advised NGO’s, government and private organisations in Europe, the USA, Asia & New Zealand for the last 16 years. He currently runs his own consulting practice in Christchurch where he also serves on the boards of several trusts.
He helped start an international newspaper in 2004 and ended up in Manhattan as Global Marketing Director until 2011 when he made New Zealand his home base.
Jaya has conducted sensitive political lobbying globally and within the UN on China human rights issues since 2005. In 2006 he was detained in Singapore for his investigation into the corruption of the domestic courts by the Chinese Communist Party. During the course of this work, he has met with world leaders such as the Dalai Lama and Rebiya Kadeer and has presented on his investigative research into organ harvesting in the UK, Sweden, USA, India, Australia and New Zealand.
He worked alongside Ethan Gutmann assisting in the research of his book The Slaughter since 2006 and as part of that led an extensive investigation into the organ harvesting of Tibetan prisoners of conscience in Dharamsala in 2009.
Bookings:
- Tickets: $8
- Book at Paramount Theatre
- Phone: (04)384 4080
