After becoming a mother, a filmmaker uncovers the untold history of China’s one-child policy and the generations of parents and children forever shaped by this social experiment.
It starts out simply: a woman becomes a mother. Her mother makes a comment about how she could only originally have one kid. She asks her mother about the one-child policy instituted in China circa 1982. The stories and explanations she hears (from all manner of Chinese) both shocks and appalls her. As it turns out, China went to draconian measures to enforce its policy and an entire population grinned and bore it. One Child Nation examines this “social experiment” its shocking enforcement and the upheaval it caused the people for decades.
Nanfu Wang tells this story of hers as she’s uncovering it in a meandering route designed to both inform and alarm us. Initially, I worried the iconography used might be too propaganda-esque to deliver an unbiased message but as the film went on I realized even biased it would be unnecessary to stretch the details to appeal to an anti-China sentiment. The Chinese government restricted the number of children a family could have to one (preferably a boy.) If people refused the government would force sterilizations, destroy people’s homes, force an abortion, or often take the child away.
The movie ebbs and flows as each new segment introduces or adds to the concept overall. We start with the most personal layer: Wang’s family and local governors. She meets a midwife who claims she performed over fifty thousand abortions throughout the course of her career. The local governor forced sterilizations on women. Why? Because, they say, “policy is policy. There was nothing to do.”
This movie shines in different degrees of shocking. There is little narrative throughline other than an examination of the policy so it bounces from element to element in a vaguely linear path. The film examines Chinese propaganda, its effects, and the dehumanization. The ubiquity of propaganda stands out as one of the largest elements in the film. Its central tenet describes the necessity to place the party over the value of the individual (apparently at the cost of tens of thousands of babies lives).
Shot very piecemeal the film incorporates all manner of imagery. It leans more on the anecdotal evidence than any singular statistics (as I suspect the country of China would suppress any hard statistics about its One Child Policy). What we watch is a patchwork of narratives strung together with informative asides when something needs explaining. The imagery ranges from deeply disturbing to mildly shocking and it never really finds a positive note, instead, dwelling on the many different ways it affects current generations. The only mild justice delivers when strict enforcers of abortions or sterilizations watch new propaganda for China’s two-child policy and see the work they did become meaningless before their eyes.
As a curiosity, it’s a decent film. It runs only an hour and a half but felt like two hours to me given that the number of interviews runs long. Well over twenty people must have told their stories, and they’re all incredible stories but the film lingers on each subject (respectfully) creating a sense of drag when it comes to the actual edit. I found myself appalled at images of dead babies on the side of the road then charmed. Still, a little more hard facts might fill in the narrative gaps between the interviews. I would ask for more details. Watch “One Child Nation” if you stumble across it, but understand you are not prepared for it (even after reading my review).
In Theaters Friday, August 16th
