Delayed Reaction: One Child Nation

Premise: A documentary examining China's long running one child policy.

Is something wrong or just different? It's hard to tell sometimes. There was always something about the one child policy that didn't sound right when I heard about it growing up. Telling people how many children to have just sounded wrong. I never thought too much about it though. Cultural differences, right? There's a lot of stuff I hear about in other countries that sounds absurd. Hell, there's stuff that my neighbors do that sounds insane.

It's nice to have this documentary to confirm a lot of what I intuitively figured about this policy. It sucked and the number of intended and unintended consequences are staggering. This is a hard movie to get through at times. I've pretty much hit my quota of seeing fetuses in landfills now (not that that number was high to begin with). The stories of forced abortions, kidnappings, and abandonnings hare harrowing. Thankfully the movie is barely 90 minutes. And even that was a little hard to get through. In hindsight, I'm not sure how I've gotten through The Act of Killing twice.

I appreciate that this was made by someone who grew up in China. As much as I love Joshua Oppenheimer's work in Indonesia for The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, it's less personal when an outsider is coming in to explore a topic. In Once Child Nation, Nanfu Wang literally interviews her family and hears very personal stories about how her family was affected by this policy. And I get the sense that she left a ton on the cutting room floor. This movie isn't for the faint, but it's good if you have the stomach for it.

Verdict: Strongly Recommend