Chinese
documentary filmmaker Nanfu Wang is something of an outcast in her own
country. With her first documentary
feature film Hooligan Sparrow, the filmmaker experienced a barrage of
harassments and police intimidation from the Chinese government as well as her
own family members being interrogated by national security agents. In her newest film, the Amazon Studios
produced One Child Nation which chronicles China’s controversial single
child family policy which lasted from 1919 to 2015, history seems to have repeated
itself with the picture all but completely censored and blocked from
circulation in China.
Endemic
of the country’s fierce control over the flow of information in the media, the
shortlist of contenders for Best Documentary in the 92nd Academy Awards
were announced yet Chinese media intentionally overlooked One Child Nation and
pretended the film didn’t exist. Moreover,
when it took home the Grand Jury prize for Best Documentary at the Sundance
Film Festival, Chinese media declined to announce the winner. After looking at the film firsthand, it is
not hard to see why this powerfully open indictment of a longstanding national policy
regarding the family unit touched the nerves of the government.
Provocative,
horrific and angering in equal measure, Wang and co-director Jialing Zhang’s
graphic and disturbing investigation of years of media indoctrination,
intimidation and the far more dire consequences arising within the policy’s effects
is among the toughest watches of this year.
Wading through years of systemic propaganda, One Child Nation simultaneously
holds photographs, posters and other forms of promotional media including songs
and slogans under a microscope and thus presents a deeply troubling portrait of
how the one child policy has destroyed the fabric of many families and even
more lives of unborn children.
The
images of landfills littered with aborted fetuses are enough to shake you to
your core, but soon that only pales in comparison to the stories of human
trafficking and breakup of existing families through abductions. Most frightening of all however is when Wang
turns her cameras on her own family with her own mother heaping boundless
praise upon the so-called ‘good’ the policy has served the Chinese family
unit. Stranger still, Wang uncovers
sexist favoritism of the male son corroborated by testimonies from siblings who
remarked the value of the female daughter was consistently downplayed from
parent to child.
As
a documentary film, One Child Nation is galvanizing and there were times
when I wanted to close my eyes.
Visually, Wang and her cinematographer Yuanchen Liu capture the
proceedings beautifully in 4K digital intermediate though a good chunk of the
footage shown in the film stems from older televised sources on Chinese news
media with some scenes looking like a VHS tape.
Aiding the grim documentary’s somber mood is an original score by Nathan
Halpern and Chris Ruggiero, casting a dark shadow over the already bleak and
upsetting picture unspooling.
This
is not an easy picture to recommend even to staunch cinephiles as it contains
numerous images and scenes throughout that I cannot unsee. And yet you have to respect the uphill battle
fought by the filmmakers to give this story worldwide attention and the fact
that it remains censored in its country of origin speaks volumes to the film’s
importance in being seen. One Child
Nation presents a painful but necessary truth as well as a long gestating
reckoning with the country’s still controversial policy waged by those who
lived through it. Not for the faint
hearted but not to be missed!
--Andrew Kotwicki