One Child Nation

The film examines China’s one-child policy in depth, re-opening a “culture of the only child” long taken for granted and tracing the deep effects of a programme of birth planning driven by the will of the state on countless families and individuals. Against a backdrop in which the state came first, stories of families torn apart come into view, speaking of what was endured by lives that could not choose their own fate.

China formally implemented the birth planning policy from 1979. Through propaganda that amounted at times to indoctrination and at times to intimidation, this vast social experiment in reproductive freedom produced a spiral of silence lasting decades. Through in-depth interviews and the tracing of family trauma, the film gathers extensive first-hand material to uncover induced labour, abortion, forced sterilisation, abandonment, and even the abduction of children by the authorities. With data, testimony and official propaganda archives, it reconstructs a historical injury rarely faced directly, and lets suppressed memory surface again.