Grand Jury Prize Winner ‘One Child Nation’ Uncovers A Traumatic History [Sundance Review]

From 1979 until 2015 China controlled its population through its notorious one-child policy. The name, in more than one way, is a misnomer. In theory, a one-child policy simply limits the number of children a family can have to one. But the reality of the policy was far more devastating. Not only were women given forced abortions, but they were often sterilized against their will, while children were taken from families and sold to orphanages. It is this deeply troubling and incredibly complex reality that Nanfu Wang’s Sundance Grand Jury Prize Winner “One Child Nation” sets out to explore.

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Wang, like so many millions of Chinese in her generation, grew up under the shadows of the one-child policy. Propaganda and cultural indoctrination kept her from questioning the policy or its fallout until, after years of living in New York, Wang had her first child. The birth of her son, Wang explains in voiceover, got her thinking about the policy, which had been so ingrained into Chinese society as to be almost invisible—a harsh law that was unquestionably enforced but that nonetheless went unquestioned.

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“One Child Nation,” as it begins, is more of a personal narrative than anything else. Wang travels back to China with her son to talk with her mother, grandfather, and brother (because they lived in a rural community, the family was allowed two children if the eldest was a girl). Wang and her family were obviously affected by the policy and the way that it subtly guided their lives, but “One Child Nation” quickly uncovers the much broader and more traumatic scale of the policy.

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Wang and co-director Jialing Zhang slowly work their way from the reality of the policy that was felt — if not ever confronted or understood — by families all over the country. They interview village leaders and family planning nurses who induced labor and aborted thousands of babies, forcibly sterilized women, and helped to tear down the houses of those who failed to follow the policy. Many are repentant and quick to say what they were doing was unforgivable, but others cling to the falsehoods they were fed and continue to be proud of their work, laying responsibility for their actions on the women and families who failed to abide by the policy. All, however, lament the fact that they were just following orders. That the policy was handed down by the party. That there was nothing they could do.

“One Child Nation” unspools like a journalist following leads, which Wang more or less is. She follows hints and clues as they arise and bounces back and forth across the Pacific while working with a private agency that traces adopted Chinese girls to their birth parents. But, as the vast and systematic trauma of the policy is laid evermore bare, Wang attempts to help track down several children that were forcibly taken from their families, which winds up raising sticky moral questions about upsetting the balance of the lives of adopted girls and their families — questions that Wang seems uninterested in answering. While it may be unsettling to consider, there is a necessity to explore the dissonance between the Chinese families longing for their stolen children and the children who might not be interested in the painful truth behind their adoption.

But, while it never satisfyingly grapples with this tension, “One Child Nation” is a thoroughly gripping and ceaselessly unnerving investigation into the policy that shaped and devastated China for a generation. Wang’s film is intimate, thought-provoking and well-crafted. It condemns the horrors of the policy without condemning those who were brainwashed into being its vessels, and it gives voice to so many families whose agency was stolen from them. [A-]

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