Horst_In_Translation Review of China's Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of Sichuan Province

China's Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of Sichuan Province (2009 TV Movie)

The "disaster" was the construction, not the earthquake

[8/10 · 31 July 2016]

"China's Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of Sichuan Province" is a 38-minute live action documentary short film from 2009. It was directed by Jon Alpert and Matthew O'Neill and it was the first of two Oscar nominations for this duo. Here they lost to a music-themed documentary. It is an American production, but the entire thing was filmed in China and features only Chinese language, which is why you will need subtitles most likely. I personally believe that this was a very important documentary. It was made about a year after a devastating earthquake that killed thousand of Chinese. The focus here is on hundreds of children dying at school because the building collapsed and buried the young ones under the ruins. It is about the parents seeking answers why the schools were constructed in a way that it would not stand until the children are out, or at best not collapse at all. It is a very sensitive subject for everybody involved. We witness how the grieving parents are running against walls of bureaucracy, corruption and refusal to answer or really find out what happened. A really sad state of affairs. Another problem is that China has a very strict one-child policy because of the huge population, which means that most parents lost their only child during the tragedy. Of course, it is also very sad if you lose a child when you have 3 more children or so, but this policy made things even worse for many of them as one parent accurately described in the film as well. And totally aside from the contents, I already applaud this documentary because it's really rare we find out about life in China these days because it's just not the greatest place for American (or foreign, in general) filmmakers to work on documentaries. I read that this one here is forbidden in China because it is unpatriotic and I would not be surprised if it is true. The saddest moment of the film was probably when a mother was interviewed and she had to talk about how they had to carry her dead daughter with their bare hands because there was no opportunity to have official authorities bury her because of all the dead people. A touching little documentary that takes us into a world we are not used to seeing. I highly recommend the watch.