I just saw this on ABC TV's (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) "4 Corners" Program tonight and it was brilliant. It will be shown again on Tuesday, 22 April at 11:35pm (Sydney time) and on ABC2 at 8am same day. Its director has been nominated for a BAFTA Award. Below is the intro excerpt to the docco.
http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/content/2008/s2219617.htm
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China's Stolen Children
Reporter: Channel 4
Broadcast: 22/04/2008
By one estimate about 70,000 children are kidnapped and sold on the black market in China each year.
Untold thousands of other people are tragically affected by the trade… this film features remarkable access to those at its core: desperate parents searching for a stolen son; a trafficker who brokers deals and who sold his own child; a young couple having to give away their newborn daughter; a private investigator who hunts for stolen children; a boy rescued from traffickers.
In modern China, baby girls can be sold for as little as $500. Boys cost $1000-plus. "China’s Stolen Children" intimately reveals the depth of this tragedy and explores the connection between child trafficking, an alarming shortage of girls and the country's stringent birth control policy. It's a link the Chinese Government
rejects.
This documentary shows a side of China that authorities would rather keep hidden – at any time, and especially in the long run-up to the Olympics. Its makers worked undercover, posing as tourists, constantly moving hotels and changing their telephone simcards.
"China's Stolen Children" recently won a Royal Television Society Award and it is listed in as having won the 2008 Current Affairs Award in the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA). Narrated by Sir Ben Kingsley, made for Channel 4 and HBO, "China's Stolen Children" airs on Four Corners at 8.30 pm Monday 21 April, on ABC1.
This program will be repeated about 11.35 pm Tuesday 22 April; also on ABC2 at 8 am Tuesday.
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Film Synopsis from True Vision TV (the film maker) web site
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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.
Narrated by Sir Ben Kingsley