PASADENA, Calif.—Cheers accompanied tears from the audience at Pasadena’s Laemmle Playhouse 7, where the award-winning “Unsilenced” just screened, telling the true story of how a group of carefree youths with promising futures from a top university in China became ostracized outlaws risking their lives every day to expose a series of government propaganda and lies when the brutal persecution against Falun Gong began in 1999. Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual practice with meditative exercises and moral principles based on truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance. According to official estimates, there were 70 million to 100 million adherents—around the same number reported to be members of the ruling Communist Party—before the Chinese regime banned the popular practice in 1999. Millions have since been detained inside prisons, labor camps, and other facilities, with hundreds of thousands tortured while incarcerated, according to the Falun Dafa Information Center. According to the film’s director, Leon Lee, making …