User Reviews

"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.

Almost cried from beginning to end while watching. It has been 10 years since the earthquake. I was still a kid when it happened and all I remember was the casuality number and propoganda on TV about the efforts of the army and government to secure people.

Through this film, I can finally walk a bit closer to the real situation of people there and look into the social problems behind. Grieving, asking for justice, protesting, being hold back. As a Chinese, I am so familiar with this kind of storytelling, because it's happening around all the time (even now in 2022 in Shanghai). But still, even in the end, they still have to trust the government and the party, even if they are having no reponses back at all.

I recently have been watching a lot of Oscar-nominated documentaries. HBO Documentaries normally do a very excellent job. For this one, I was disappointed. The parents (who tragically lost their children in what was probably a corrupt system) largely come off as whiny in the documentary. I don't think this was the aim We hear the parents and the government officials (whom they translate in red, which I found very nice) speaking in their native language (which is what should happen in a documentary). As a non-Chinese speaker I was reading the subtitles. I think what hurt the power of this documentary to show the real tragedy of the parents was the subdued nature of the documentary commentary, which was only done in short comments white text on a black screen. There were enough of them, but something about them didn't draw me in to this film. I do hope the government (although suspect not) did eventually work toward the goals of these unfortunate parents.