• Director(s):

    MARANT (Alexis)

  • Producer(s):

    ARTE FRANCE

  • Territories:

    Worldwide.

  • Production year:

    2006

  • Language(s):

    English, French

  • Rights:

    TV

Is Asia becoming a continent without women? A 100 million young girls are said to be "missing" in the world today. Massive female-selective abortions and child murders are practised mainly in Asia.

On the day a baby girl is born, she is generally abandoned along a road, in a ditch or at a refuse dump. Even more frequently, the baby is murdered by the father, mother or by a so-called "baby girl killer", a practice whereby the parents hire a man for a few rupees to kill the child in the fist weeks of her life.
Today even modern medicine is helping the practise this archaic tradition.
In fact, faster advances in prenatal medicine, such as amniocentesis and ultrasound scans have made it easier to identify and abort millions of female foetuses.
The decrease in the number of women in Asia will have, in the long term, serious political and social consequences on the entire world. Such growing imbalance, over the past twenty years or so, is certain to create dramatic demographic disruption.
For either cultural reasons as in India, economic as in Pakistan, political as in China, whatever the mad reasoning, Asia is slowly but surely becoming a continent where there are just not enough women.

2008 : Media Prize for Documentary (Fondation pour l'Enfance); 2007 : Grand Prize & Public Award ; 2006 : Albert Londres Prize for Manon Loiseau and Alexis Marant / FIGRA (International Festival of current affairs reports).