China’s Stolen Children (2007)

Ten years after the policy-changing and award-winning film, The Dying Rooms, the same team returns to a very different China where the infamous One Child Policy has had the horrific side effect of a boom in stolen children. With extraordinary access to devastated parents desperately searching for their stolen son; a man who brokers the deals and has sold his own offspring; and prospective parents grappling with giving up their soon-to-be-born daughter through lack of options, we are brought face to face with the crisis that such a stringent government policy has created among China’s poorest people. Beautiful, haunting, deeply tragic, but impossible to ignore, this film takes us into the heart of modern China. A place where girl babies are being sold for 3,000-4,000 RMB (£200-270); detectives specialise in finding kidnapped children; and child traffickers are so relaxed about the trade they ply, that they allow the film-makers to covertly record them buying and selling tiny human lives. Tens of thousands of children are now kidnapped and traded on the black market whilst the State is more concerned with keeping the story quiet than tracing Chinas stolen children.