(soft music)
- I'd like to start with talking
about choosing your subject.
You guys are gonna spend years sometimes with these people
and these topics.
How do you decide what to do?
Nanfu why don't you begin?
- Well first that was actually a challenge
because our subject was the one child policy
and China has more than a billion people
so almost everyone has a story about the one child policy
to talk about out.
So eventually we decided we want to do 360 degree
with the policy,
people who carried out the policy
and people who were the victims of the policy.
What turns out when we started meeting people
we realized even the people who carried out the policy,
they are part of the victims too.
So that was actually we decided officials, midwives,
women, and people who does propaganda,
and we decided to choose one of the representatives of each.
We have a lot of archival,
almost all archival are produced by the state
so it's showing the state propaganda
and almost that's all the role that the archival
played and when I grew up I grew up in the propaganda.
Everything I saw
was propaganda. - Propaganda.
- So there were songs, the theaters, movies,
and before I could even speak you know I learned
songs meaning that I don't know like communism
and socialism and everything and this became the back
of my mind and I don't even question it.
Until now I'm making the film and for the first time
I'm looking back to my past
and realized how they had affected
the way that I think and realized how much my ideology
and world view were shaped by the propaganda
and now I'm finding them again.
Luckily because how much the state produce,
I believe Russia is the same,
that is everywhere.
So we would go on internet, YouTube, you know
and then also antique bookstore we would find
a ton of those propaganda.
- Here in US or in China?
- [Nanfu] Both.
Even YouTube has a lot of people uploaded it but of course
back in China there were way more.
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- It's so interesting I feel growing up surrounded
by propaganda that you would choose documentary
film-making as your profession.
Do you see any link between these two things?
- Well I had never even seen a documentary until I came
to the US in 2011.
I came and I was 26 and thought
I was gonna become a journalist so we could write
about that injustice in China.
- To Ohio by the way.
(laughs) - In Ohio and then I took
a documentary class and there I saw so many documentaries
for the first time.
I mean I told Alex that I saw "Taxi to the Dark Side"
twice in the class.
(laughs) And that moment
I was like oh my god I never knew that documentaries
could be like this 'cause in China with the censorship
and the restriction the documentaries are about Chinese
magnificent landscape (laughs) or history
and great Chinese food.
That's about it.
And I thought that was what documentary was about
until I finally saw it could be about social issue,
it could be compelling and about characters
and that was like okay I want to do this.
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- Thinking about audience,
is there one person who you really would love
to have see your film?
- Ironically like the people that we want them see the film
most are the people who can't see.
It's Chinese people because we make film hopefully
that would challenge the official narrative in China
and the people there because the information
was so restricted that they tend to believe the propaganda.
Still my friends all turned against me and say,
"Why do you make a film that damage our national image?"
and so I lost a lot of my closest friends
because they believed
that I got brainwashed by the Western media.
- [All] Oh.
- And it was funny that even my mom who saw the film,
my mom has never been to a movie theater,
talking about your mom,
she's never been to a movie theater before and so I brought
her to Sundance 'cause I thought if she's ever gonna see
a film of mine that would be the experience because she
was in the film and after she saw the film she was like,
"Yeah your film was so true and so it was everything
like I witnessed but I still support the policy."
(laughs) - Oh!
- Yeah it just showed me how effective the propaganda was.
She lived her entire life there.
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