{"id":20115,"date":"2020-03-25T11:04:42","date_gmt":"2020-03-25T18:04:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.pbs.org\/independentlens\/?post_type=blog&p=20115"},"modified":"2023-09-29T11:41:17","modified_gmt":"2023-09-29T18:41:17","slug":"nanfu-wangs-riveting-personal-story-probes-impact-of-one-child-policy","status":"publish","type":"blog","link":"https:\/\/www.pbs.org\/independentlens\/blog\/nanfu-wangs-riveting-personal-story-probes-impact-of-one-child-policy\/","title":{"rendered":"Nanfu Wang’s Riveting Personal Story Probes Impact of One-Child Policy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Taking risks is nothing new for Chinese filmmaker Nanfu Wang. Her previous documentary <\/span>I Am Another You<\/span><\/i><\/a>, which was a SXSW Jury Award-winner and aired on Independent Lens<\/em>, involved her having to live on the streets with the homeless subject of her film, and prior to that she became a target of the Chinese government when telling the powerful story of political activists for her film <\/span>Hooligan Sparrow<\/span><\/i><\/a>–which required Wang to have to smuggle footage out of China. That film is a miracle for even getting made, yet alone turning out to be such a gripping work. And her latest film, <\/span>One Child Nation<\/i><\/b><\/a>, involved some similar finagling, risk-taking, dodging and weaving to get made, as she approached a controversial, and even horrific, story with humanity and poignancy.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

One Child Nation<\/span><\/i> revisits China\u2019s one-child policy, the extreme population control measure that made it illegal for couples to have more than one child. While the policy may have ended in 2015, the process of dealing with the trauma of its brutal enforcement is very much ongoing.<\/span><\/p>\n

“What eventually emerges is a peerless portrait of collective trauma,” wrote David Fear in <\/span>Rolling Stone<\/span><\/i> of the film<\/span>. “A devastating look at how this law not only sociologically gutted a country but made everyone complicit in the crime.”\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The film made the Academy Award feature documentary shortlist, and while it wasn’t ultimately a finalist, the impact is unquestioned.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I spoke with Nanfu Wang and her co-director Jialing Zhang<\/strong> by phone just before the Oscar nominations were announced. We talked about what the Oscars mean in China, how the two filmmakers worked in tandem to keep the film going while protecting Nanfu’s safety, how they got people to talk about such a painful topic, and how her family watches (or doesn’t) films.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Why did you make <\/b>One Child Nation<\/i><\/b>?\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

Nanfu Wang: <\/b>\u00a0In early 2016, I met for coffee with one of our producers, Christoph Jorg, and he asked me what I thought of the one-child policy as a person who grew up under it. We had ongoing conversations about making a film on the subject, but it wasn\u2019t until I became pregnant that the idea of exploring the meaning of the policy in a film became stuck in my mind. I moved away from China several years ago and didn\u2019t have to worry about getting government approval to have a child. Having my first child made me think about what it would have been like for the state to control such an essential aspect of my humanity, and I wanted to explore my questions about that in the film.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

When it was time for production to start, it was unclear whether it would be safe for me to go back to China because my previous film, <\/span>Hooligan Sparrow<\/span><\/i>, was politically sensitive. I reached out to my friend Jialing Zhang, a great filmmaker whom I met in grad school, to see if she would be interested in co-directing with me. She was the perfect collaborator for this project. Her doggedness and sensitivity were crucial to the process of finding and interviewing people affected by the policy. Like me, she was born in the 1980s under the one-child policy and only left China for school as an adult. We shared a lot in common, including the same sense of responsibility to tell this story.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

As soon as conversations with interview subjects began, it became clear that the policy was intensely traumatic for everyone we spoke with. Eventually, we realized that the story needed to include the voices of people who carried out the policy. We needed to find out what motivated them, how they felt in retrospect about what they did.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I think we expected the film to be a story of victims and perpetrators, but when we started speaking with family planning officials, it just became clear how complex and fraught the story of the policy really is.<\/span><\/p>\n

Who do you hope your film impacts the most or that this story reaches?\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

We hope this film reaches audiences everywhere, including and especially Chinese audiences, to fill in the gaps of the official history of the one-child policy – hopefully it will show what the policy really meant for the people who lived it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Our goal was to make a film that in 50 or 100 years will survive as a reliable account of what really happened during the one-child policy. It can serve as a rebuttal to the official narrative, which in China already is pure propaganda. Even outside of China, many people we\u2019ve spoken with have told us how surprised they were by the details of the film, which shows how effective the propaganda promoting the policy truly has been.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Whether or not you get the Oscar nomination [this chat happened a few days before the Oscar announcement], and making the Shortlist is an honor, I was wondering how such a high profile award, the Oscars, is viewed in China? Would getting a nomination have any effect on how the Chinese government views the film and you?<\/b><\/p>\n

Oscars are very popular in China\u2014it\u2019s live-streamed, the nominations and then the show. So that is the one award the Chinese government is already concerned about or paying attention to. The other awards, most of the time it doesn’t reach the general Chinese public. But the Oscars everyone [there] pays attention to. When the Oscar shortlist for docs was announced, there were waves of social media discussion and comments, people asking about the film. If the film was nominated, I would definitely expect there would be a lot more people in China wanting to see the film, or start searching for the film, getting to know more about it. We can also expect tighter censorship around the film from the government.<\/span><\/p>\n