Director

Nanfu Wang, Jialing Zhang

China, United States | 2019 | 85 min | English, Mandarin Chinese with subtitles in English and Arabic

• Producer Nanfu Wang, Jialing Zhang, Julie Goldman, Christoph Jörg, Christopher Clements, Carolyn Hepburn
• Production Company Next Generation
• Screenplay
• Cinematography Nanfu Wang, Yuanchen Liu
• Editing Nanfu Wang
• Sound Ron Bochar, Michael Shade, Sara Stern, Philip Stockton, Allan Zaleski
• Cast
• Contacts

  Dogwoof

  info@dogwoof.com

About the Film

Between 1979 and 2015, the Chinese state enforced a policy that banned parents from having more than a single child. Implemented by the regime of Deng Xiaoping, the policy was designed to prevent an apocalyptic population explosion that, as the state depicted it, would provoke famine and cannibalism. Birth-control advocates—including some in the Western media—supported the one-child policy, overlooking the draconian measures used to enforce it.

Spare and passionate, Nanfu Wang and Jialing Zhang’s 2019 documentary scrutinizes the consequences of the regime’s social engineering project from the intimate perspective of Wang’s family and some other residents of their village in Jiangxi Province. Because traditional culture tends to value infant boys over girls, the one child policy abetted practices of abandonment—and death—as well as international trafficking of infant Chinese girls. The filmmakers interview local politicians charged with enforcing state policy, two female healthcare professionals—a repentant midwife and a doctor who became a national celebrity for her birth-control militancy—who implemented it through forced abortions and sterilizations, in addition to family members and friends who tried to abide by it. One Child Nation premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Grand Jury Prize in the documentary competition.

Jim Quilty