One Child Nation (2019)
This year I have made an effort to get out to the theater and see more documentaries as they release instead of waiting for awards season and just seeing the main ones fighting for the Oscar nomination. So far this has really paid off this year with releases like Apollo 11, Maiden, Hail Satan?, and Wrestle. Yet even as these films became some of my favorites of the year there was one on the horizon that I felt could beat them all. One Child Nation follows filmmaker Nanfu Wang as she returns to China to explore their One Child Policy that lasted between 1979 and 2015 which only allowed families to have 1 child as a way to combat their population crisis. She talks to friends, family, and officials about what this policy did to them and tries to explore the harm it really did pushing both civilians and the government into really dark places. The One-Child Policy is something I remember hearing about in elementary and middle school even here in America though it was always treated as a rumor or myth. The idea that the government would prevent families from having more than one child seemed dystopian and evil so going into this documentary pretty blind on the actual facts surrounding the policy I felt it had a really easy task. This policy screams evil so to go and show the pain it put on people seemed like it would not only be easy but wildly effective and touching. This film got on the radar for me after winning the U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Documentary at Sundance in January and since then a snowball of buzz formed in the lead up to its release. I was beyond excited when it finally came out near me and I was able to go see the film yet it didn't go quite as planned for me. As I sat there watching the movie I got more and more disappointed and even angry at the film as somehow it takes a super easy argument and struggles to present it to the audience. This is going to be one of my most disappointing films of the year and even though it is far from being one of the worst films of the year for me it is nowhere near what I thought it would end up being.

As I mentioned the side that this movie is trying to take in this conversation seems like one of the easiest sides to argue for, not only was this policy just restrictive on basic human rights but the execution of it left a river of blood and terror. From forced abortions and sterilization to taking kids away from their parents, there is so much real suffering here that this movie just decides to glance over and instead focus on some of the weirdest arguments I have ever heard. There is a scene in this movie where Nanfu Wang is in China and asks to talk to some of the women who were forced to get abortions, her family and friends end up talking her out this not understanding why someone would want to hear of the suffering or why she would want to make those women relive their trauma. Though that is the main point of why this policy was so bad, it was the trauma and suffering it put on these people so instead of looking into that the main point of this movie and why it is saying the policy is bad becomes that the people of China are sexist so when they had a girl they left it to slowly die so that they could try again for a boy. I struggle to find reasons to pity people who felt forced by their own sexism to kill their own baby even if they feel overall bad about it. The beginning of this movie also decides to focus on making the concept of abortions seem bad rather than focusing on the fact that these women were forced to have them which personally is not an argument I stand by. At the very end, they try to tie this into a message of choice with comparing China and the United States with both taking away the freedom women have to get an abortion but after spending an hour hearing people say how bad abortions were as a concept I can't say that the film tried to get that message across. Sure there are other levels to this like the suffering women faced but we don't get to hear nearly anything about that in the film so I can't give it credit for bringing that up as it actively chooses to avoid the subject of suffering outside of fetuses being killed and families being disappointed they had a girl so they make the hard decision to murder their children, neither of which are effective.

Even when talking about the policy itself I found the film to be really ineffective at explaining why the policy was bad, most of the people she interview (even ones that decided to murder their own children out of sexism) said the policy was an overall good idea by the government and does really nothing to debate the ideas behind this policy. China was in a population crisis and in interviews we directly hear how bad things were before the policy. People were starving and struggling to simply survive and the policy fixed that (at least that is what the movie says; if there are other factors which I am sure there are it was never brought up so I can't add that to the conversation). There are even times in the movie where I actively started to think the policy was a good idea which is the total opposite effect than what the film wanted to have. It also gets weirdly lost in the second half around the idea of child trafficking at the time with people selling babies they find to orphanages who then basically sell them to adopting families internationally. There are two sides to this that are never really clearly defined as they blend them together into one long portion of the film that feels really out of place. The first being civilians who found babies abandoned by their sexist families and left to die, apparently the problem was so bad that they could find 3-5 babies each day just left to slowly die. The film starts to try and say that these civilians are bad in some way for taking these babies to the orphanages and basically selling them for money but when the alternative is that these kids would die I see them as the true heroes in the story along with the orphanages. Without any clear break between the two, the film also talks about government officials who would take illegal children from families and then sell them to the orphanages which is definitely wrong and bad. This is the only real-time in the film where it fully tries to explore someones suffering as these kids were taken from their homes but to lump together the civilians saving lives and governments making a profit on taking kids away from their families seems like a big misdirection.
Though overall the film is really messy and I think that is to blame for miscommunications like these. Not only from a content standpoint do I think this film misses the mark but from an editing standpoint, it is such a mess. It gets in long boring tangents that are confusing and lack a real point. It constantly is dancing around getting into the darker depths of this conversation which should be it's focus and does a really bad job at presenting the audience with this issue and any alternative solutions that the government could have taken. I will say that the film has some good footage in it, the interviews they get are all high quality and they do have some with really interesting people who would have an interesting perspective on the subject if they were pushed correctly during the interview but sadly they rarely are. This is a movie that should have been really easy to make but instead, at nearly every point where it could have become effective and meaningful, it turns away creating tangents with weird arguments that completely missed the landing. Maybe I just missed something as this film has wide acclaim up to this point but I felt like I was watching a completely different movie than everyone else. This was ineffective, badly made, and overall just a disappointment.
Though overall the film is really messy and I think that is to blame for miscommunications like these. Not only from a content standpoint do I think this film misses the mark but from an editing standpoint, it is such a mess. It gets in long boring tangents that are confusing and lack a real point. It constantly is dancing around getting into the darker depths of this conversation which should be it's focus and does a really bad job at presenting the audience with this issue and any alternative solutions that the government could have taken. I will say that the film has some good footage in it, the interviews they get are all high quality and they do have some with really interesting people who would have an interesting perspective on the subject if they were pushed correctly during the interview but sadly they rarely are. This is a movie that should have been really easy to make but instead, at nearly every point where it could have become effective and meaningful, it turns away creating tangents with weird arguments that completely missed the landing. Maybe I just missed something as this film has wide acclaim up to this point but I felt like I was watching a completely different movie than everyone else. This was ineffective, badly made, and overall just a disappointment.