It's a Girl

Director Evan Grae Davis's disquieting documentary sheds light on the practice of gendercide in India and China. It's a Girl opens with an Indian woman who killed eight of her infant daughters because she was hoping for a son. While she may have been acting on a cultural preference, it's hard to sympathize with her actions—no matter how neatly she buried the bodies. But Davis wisely continues to take a non-inflammatory tone towards this upsetting topic, using animated drawings along the way to illustrate statistics, including the shocker that one out of four Indian girls do not live past puberty. Sons can bring prosperity to parents through the antiquated dowry system, but since marriage-age daughters represent a financial loss, poorer families see them as a drain on their resources. Other unwanted girls meet their ends through abandonment and abortion in a situation that activist Rita Banerji describes as “systemic negligence.” In China, the one-child policy, which went into effect in 1979, has produced similar outcomes, including forced abortion and sterilization. Although rural families may have two children, many also hope for boys. When a woman named Li and her husband had a third girl, they left their children with relatives and went into hiding, hoping to reunite with them someday. The consequences for parents who break the law include steep fines and a lack of citizenship (and its attendant benefits) for their "extra" children, but the subsequent shortage of women for men to marry has led to a rise in kidnapping and sex-trafficking. Some of the white-collar subjects here experience more positive outcomes, but they also have greater financial means at their disposal with which to fight cultural and policy norms. DVD extras include extended interviews, behind-the-scenes featurettes, and a discussion guide. Highly recommended. Aud: C, P. (K. Fennessy)