Film captures emotions, effects of China’s one-child policy

Spazju Kreattiv is showing the latest film by Chinese director Wang Xiaoshuai, who returns to the big screen with an epic melodrama that explores the consequences across three decades of China’s one-time one-child policy, which lasted from 1979-2013. Xiaoshuai’s So Long, My Son (Di jiu tian chang) is an impressively structured time-hopping saga just over three hours long, which charts a complex if cumbersome emotional history of the country’s population-planning programme. The film traces the lives of two families over three decades of social, political and human upheaval in China. Following the loss of a child in a tragic accident, their paths separate. Destinies ebb and flow, and fortunes are transformed under the impact of a country’s changing face. Yet even as their lives diverge, a common search for truth and reconciliation around the tragedy remains. So Long, My Son is being screened at the Spazju Kreattiv cinema today at 4.30pm. The film will be screened again on other dates and times in the coming weeks. For more information and tickets, visit at www.kreattivita.org.