One Child Nation

A probing, personal investigation into the human cost of China’s one-child policy, the film follows director Nanfu Wang as she confronts family secrets, state propaganda, and the bureaucratic machinery that enforced population control. Through intimate interviews with both victims and former officials, archival clips, and Wang’s own family history, the documentary pieces together stories of forced sterilizations, coerced abortions, abandoned children, and the shadowy networks that profited from a nation’s policy.

The film moves between anger and sorrow, mixing investigative rigor with emotional honesty to examine complicity, trauma, and the long-term consequences for individuals and society. Unflinching but empathetic, it asks difficult moral questions about responsibility and memory, leaving viewers with a deeper, more complicated understanding of how policy can permeate private life.