The Lost Voices of China’s Children – Finally Heard

Posted by Laura Artesi on May 9, 2009 under Documentary, Foreign Film, HBO | Comments are off for this article

On Monday I was fortunate enough to attend the premier of a documentary by Jon Alpert and Matthew O’Neill entitled China’s Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of Sichuan Province, a heartbreaking story filmed during the aftermath of the earthquake that devastated provincial China on May 12th, 2008.

The film reveals the shocking figures that nearly 70,000 people were killed in the earthquake, but of those approximately 10,000 were children. This is largely due to the fact that many fallen buildings were schools – schools that had been inspected and deemed safe by government regulations. Parents stood, crying amidst the rubble of decimated school buildings, meanwhile most of the surrounding structures were completely in tact. The devastated parents, placing framed school pictures of their children together as if in ghostly classrooms, were left with nothing but questions as to how the school buildings were among the only structures that fell. Digging through the rubble, they discovered bricks held together with cement that brushed away like dust, and supporting walls where the mortar was mixed with sticks and was far too thin to meet building standards. They sought justice and answers, but when no member of the local government or rescue teams had visited them after 10 days, they banded together and began a 70 mile march toward the provincial capitol, carrying their children’s pictures like shields as they broke through police lines.

The documentary has no narration, but is told entirely by the editing together of interviews with the grieving parents and footage of their fight to ensure that their children’s deaths were not in vain. China still tries to enforce a strict one child policy, so many of the parents lost their only child. In reparation they were compensated the pithy sum of 317 dollars per child. Read more of this article »