One Child Nation

One Child Nation (2019) is an American documentary you can watch online on iFILM. Director Nanfu Wang began this project right after the birth of her first child — which is why the film's urgency never lets up.

For three decades China enforced a strict one-child-per-family rule, and the country largely absorbed it as official fact. Wang returns to the village where she grew up and turns on the camera: local officials, midwives, propaganda artists, an American adoptive father who spent years tracing the biological families of Chinese children. The testimonies stack up — forced sterilizations, infants abandoned by roadsides, a generation of girls who vanished from the record books.

Co-directed with Zhang Jialing, the film took the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance 2019. What stays with you isn't the policy's scale — it's how ordinary the people who carried it out appear on screen. Watch One Child Nation (2019) online on iFILM.