oldnick13

While I appreciate that something needs to be done about the female infanticide and generally the status of women around the world (especially in South and East Asia), this movie does not advance the cause. The message of female empowerment is merely a guise concealing the insidious true anti-choice message. I had been looking forward to watching this documentary for some time, but didn't feel steeled enough emotionally for it. A few weeks back I pulled it up on Netflix, and didn't make it far before I realized something was off. The first clue came in the use of the term "feticide." This term has a long pedigree, but in recent years it has been used primarily for anti-choice legislation. If it were only this instant I could get beyond it, since they were just talking about infanticide and maybe it was just a regional Indian term. Then Dr. Puneet Bedi said "Infanticide was a very horrible, very terrible thing to live with for the rest of your life, so the medical profession provided an easy, kinder way of killing. AS IF KILLING BEFORE BIRTH SOMEHOW MADE IT KINDER." Then without sourcing, an animated story is told of unscrupulous doctors performing sex selective abortions on the down low. In the India portion there is a focus on prosecuting doctors who provide sex selective abortions. Once the film moves on to China, the government is vilified for encouraging abortion. It continues like this for the whole movie. There will be a few minutes of film from a social work prospective, and then the anti- abortion propaganda appears again. There is no discussion of reproductive rights as a means to empower women, even though a great number of studies have found this approach to be extremely effective. It wasn't until after I watched the film and was feeling a little disturbed (not from a sense of empathy, but from the feeling that I was deceived) that I decided to Google the film with the word "abortion," and discovered that the film was produced by Shadowline Films, which is a shell corp for Harvest Media Ministry, a producer of "pro-life" documentaries. There is an excellent Slate article explaining the film's anti-choice ties entitled "It's a Trick: Pro- choice groups love this movie. Its director worked for a pro-life ministry. How did that happen?" written by international human rights legal scholar Sital Kalantry .

What an amazing movie! I stumbled upon this looking for something in the vein of Bob Fosse, and was not disappointed. A complex character piece full of emotional depth, with a sarcastic tragic chorus in the form of a modern Brechtian circus. I can't believe that this film has not received more kudos. While I was able to catch quite a bit of the symbolism, I know that this is a film that I will have to watch over and over peeling away layers in attempt to reach the core. I probably won't be able to watch it again for a while though because it made me feel quite melancholic, but that only adds to the beauty of this terrific film. I wish I had discovered it sooner.