One Child Nation

China's one child policy, in force from 1979 to 2015. The documentary tells it not through statistics but by talking to the people who carried it out: a midwife who performed sterilisations, a village official, a trafficker who collected babies, and members of the director's own family. Nanfu Wang and Jialing Zhang directed. Wang is also the narrator and the subject, returning to her village to question her family. Its hardest sections show how comprehensive the state propaganda was: operas, posters, children's songs and school books. Adoption is a separate thread: how abandoned girls were moved into the international adoption system and money was made from it. Wang accuses nobody directly; the people she speaks to say they had no other option, and the film records that answer too. It won the documentary grand jury prize at Sundance in 2019. Who it is for: viewers interested in political documentary and the individual consequences of state policy. Who it is not for: anyone unprepared for the subject; the film includes hard material, including images of abandoned infants.