One Child Nation

China ended its one-child policy in 2015, but the ramifications of the decades-long law are still reverberating throughout the country in traumatic and haunting ways. Inspired by the birth of her own son, codirector Nanfu Wang returns to her village, where questions posed to family members about the policy lead to grim revelations about forced sterilization, property destruction, child abandonment, and human trafficking that were openly practiced. Chilling and complex, One Child Nation reveals the horrific measures taken by China’s citizens, fed by propaganda, that have long been covered up. Winner of the Sundance Film Festival’s Grand Jury Prize, US Documentary.

“Balancing its investigative interests with its emotional outrage, the expansive story offers a nonetheless concise picture of this ‘population war.’ In a larger sense, it provides a stirring look at a nation that seeks to control the bodies of its women, while seeing them as second-class to men. Wang does not make any immediate comparisons to America, but the parallels are as obvious as they are significant.”—Nick Allen, RogerEbert.com