# The Blood of Yingzhou District
*The Blood of Yingzhou District* (颍州的孩子) is a 39-minute documentary short from 2006, directed by Ruby Yang and produced by [Thomas Lennon](https://www.edgepedia.org/thomas-lennon), that follows children in Yingzhou District, Anhui Province, China, who have been orphaned by AIDS or infected with HIV themselves. It won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject at the 79th Academy Awards in February 2007.[1](https://www.scmp.com/article/583039/aids-activists-hail-win-mainland-expose) • [2](https://www.oscars.org/oscars/ceremonies/2007)
| Key fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Subject | A year in the lives of children in the remote villages of Yingzhou District, Anhui Province, who lost their parents to AIDS[3](https://yangruby.com/the-blood-of-yingzhou-district/) |
| Director / producer | Ruby Yang (director), Thomas Lennon (producer); a production of the China AIDS Media Project with Sesame Workshop and HBO Documentary Films[1](https://www.scmp.com/article/583039/aids-activists-hail-win-mainland-expose) • [4](https://library.thebeijingcenter.org/cgi-bin/koha/opac-detail.pl?biblionumber=12904) |
| Runtime and footage | 39 minutes, cut down from 80 hours of footage shot over a year[1](https://www.scmp.com/article/583039/aids-activists-hail-win-mainland-expose) |
| Academy Award | Best Documentary Short Subject, 79th Academy Awards, February 25, 2007[2](https://www.oscars.org/oscars/ceremonies/2007) |
| Central figures | Gao Jun, an infected orphan who does not speak until the closing minutes; Nan Nan, an HIV-positive teenager; and the three Huang siblings[5](https://www.international.ucla.edu/apc/article/63757) • [6](https://yangruby.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Bloodofyingzhou_PressKit.pdf) |
| Other honors | Grand Jury Award, Silverdocs 2006; Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Award, 2009; Audience Award, Thessaloniki 2007[3](https://yangruby.com/the-blood-of-yingzhou-district/) • [7](https://vimeo.com/29332600) |
| Follow-up | *The Blood of Yingzhou District Revisited* (2013) returned to the same children ten years on[8](https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10085395/1/Lo_9780429507465.pdf) |
## Spoilers
### Plot
The place is rural Yingzhou District, Fuyang, Anhui, in the aftermath of the 1990s blood-selling schemes in which poor farmers sold plasma to collection stations that reused contaminated equipment, infecting whole villages. The film opens on the smallest and most exposed victim of that disaster: Gao Jun, a toddler whose parents died of AIDS and who carries HIV himself. He is passed among relatives who are terrified of him. His uncle lays out the arithmetic of stigma in one line: "If my children play with him, other parents will forbid their children from playing with mine."[15](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(06)69822-X/fulltext) So the boy is fed, kept at arm's length, and loved only from a distance, mostly by a grandmother who is herself at the end of her strength.
The film then widens to other children in the same bind. Ren Nannan, fourteen, is shunned by her relatives and lives with her healthy elder sister, known as "Little Flower," in a household with no adults at all; their parents died of AIDS. Nannan is sick, isolated, and old enough to understand exactly why no one visits. The Huang siblings, orphaned and led by ten-year-old Huang Xinlei, are rejected by neighbors and schoolmates to the point that school itself becomes a battleground, until businesswoman [Zhang Ying](https://www.edgepedia.org/zhang-ying) organizes charitable aid for them. Into this landscape steps the Fu'ai Charity, the organization whose workers become the film's only steady adults, searching for anyone willing to foster an HIV-positive child.
**The film's most remembered sequence is Gao Jun's adoption by a couple who are themselves HIV-positive, during which the toddler speaks his first word on camera.** After months of being the child nobody will touch, he lands in a home where his infection is not a secret and not a shame, and under his foster parents' care he simply blooms: he talks, he plays, he becomes a boy instead of a problem. The Beijing Review described the moment of his first spoken word as the sequence audiences remember most.[16](http://www.bjreview.com/exclusive/txt/2007-02/08/content_56080_2.htm) The crew's own fond recollection from the months of filming is quieter but just as telling: half a year in, riding on his uncle's back in a field, Gao Jun picked a rape flower, took a bite of it, and smiled, his first smile, the moment the filmmakers knew he would live.[17](https://www.chinachristiandaily.com/news/culture/2017-12-16/-interview-shooting-director-of-oscar-winner-blood-of-yingzhou-district-no-discrimination-against-aids-hiv-children-6466)
The film refuses to let that relief stand. Gao Jun's happiness with his foster family is short-lived: he becomes so sick that the family, unable to cope, is forced to give him up, and the last the audience sees of him is a small figure walking away down a dirt road.[16](http://www.bjreview.com/exclusive/txt/2007-02/08/content_56080_2.htm) Nothing is said over the shot. Nannan's story reaches its own painful peak on Little Flower's wedding day, when the sister conceals Nannan's HIV status from her new in-laws and is visibly torn apart by the choice to leave her sister behind yet again in order to have a life at all.
The ending is deliberately unresolved. Gao Jun is placed again, this time with foster parents found by the Fu'ai Charity, and the film closes on the transformation that follows: the boy who would not smile is soon playing, shouting, and laughing with his new siblings.[15](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(06)69822-X/fulltext) It is not a restoration, only a fragile arrangement, and the film shows it that way.
### Characters
Gao Jun is the film's center of gravity, a toddler orphaned and HIV-positive, passed between relatives who fear him until foster care gives him, briefly and then more durably, a family. His uncle embodies the village's dilemma, torn between duty and the social cost of letting his own children near the boy. Ren Nannan is the fourteen-year-old AIDS patient living with her elder sister "Little Flower," whose wedding-day concealment of Nannan's status gives the film its most adult heartbreak. Huang Xinlei, ten, heads the orphaned Huang siblings and carries the film's account of children shut out by schools and neighbors. Zhang Ying is the businesswoman whose charitable organizing offers the one model of an adult who simply shows up.
### Interpretations and controversies
The film itself stirred little controversy, but its subject did, and its effect in China became part of its story. Produced as part of The China AIDS Media Project's campaign to raise AIDS awareness, the filmmakers estimated that the film and its outreach had already reached some 200 million Chinese viewers.[15](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(06)69822-X/fulltext) The deeper controversy belongs to the epidemic it documents: a preventable catastrophe caused by unsafe blood-collection practices and compounded by official silence, with the children left to pay for it in stigma. Delivered almost without narration, the film's argument is that the fear around these children is a social infection with no pathogen behind it.
## Background and production
The film grew out of the China AIDS Media Project (CAMP), an organization Yang and Lennon established in 2003 to spread AIDS information in China; *The Blood of Yingzhou District* was the project's first effort to reach international audiences.[6](https://yangruby.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Bloodofyingzhou_PressKit.pdf) Yang, a Hong Kong-born filmmaker then based in Beijing, had worked as series editor on [Bill Moyers](https://www.edgepedia.org/bill-moyers)' *Becoming American: the Chinese Experience* in 2003, and the idea of filming abandoned AIDS orphans in China came to her during that work.[1](https://www.scmp.com/article/583039/aids-activists-hail-win-mainland-expose) • [5](https://www.international.ucla.edu/apc/article/63757)
The context was an epidemic that had spread through illegal blood sales and transfusions in Henan, the province next to Anhui, in the 1990s; reports about it first put China on the world's AIDS map.[1](https://www.scmp.com/article/583039/aids-activists-hail-win-mainland-expose) In the villages the film depicts, desperate parents sold blood for a few yuan and contracted HIV, and their orphaned children were then shunned by neighbors, shuffled between families, or abandoned.[9](https://miff.com.au/festival-archive/films/12522/the-blood-of-yingzhou-district) • [7](https://vimeo.com/29332600) The duPont-Columbia award citation places the children it follows among an estimated 75,000 children in China orphaned by AIDS.[7](https://vimeo.com/29332600)
Filming took place over roughly a year in the villages of Yingzhou District, near Fuyang in Anhui. According to Zhang Ying, head of the Fuyang AIDS Orphan Salvation Association, who is credited in Yang's Oscar speech, the shooting schedule ran about eight months with visits arranged around events in the children's lives, the longest lasting 15 days.[1](https://www.scmp.com/article/583039/aids-activists-hail-win-mainland-expose) • [10](https://news.sina.com.cn/o/2007-02-28/075011304040s.shtml) The film was shot with small-format cameras entirely by Chinese film crews, notably the Beijing cinematographer Qu Jiangtao, which its press materials credit with an intimacy and candor rarely seen in documentary work from China.[6](https://yangruby.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Bloodofyingzhou_PressKit.pdf) Yang edited the film with Ma Man Chung, and Brian Keane composed the original music.[4](https://library.thebeijingcenter.org/cgi-bin/koha/opac-detail.pl?biblionumber=12904)
## The children in the film
The documentary's central figure is Gao Jun, a young village boy who lost both parents to AIDS and is himself infected. Little is known about him, not even his age, and he does not speak a word until the closing minutes of the film; his extended family weighs whether to keep him as he is moved between foster homes.[6](https://yangruby.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Bloodofyingzhou_PressKit.pdf) • [11](https://www.tvguide.com/movies/the-blood-of-yingzhou-district/2030350318/) The film also follows Nan Nan, an HIV-positive teenager infected through mother-to-child transmission, and the three Huang siblings, who lost both parents to the disease and resolve to become educated.[5](https://www.international.ucla.edu/apc/article/63757) • [11](https://www.tvguide.com/movies/the-blood-of-yingzhou-district/2030350318/)
Yang described keeping a critical distance from her subjects to manage the emotional toll, sometimes sending her cinematographer to the villages instead of going herself. A visit to the home of the Huang children, full of empty medicine bottles, old toys, and children's scribbles on the walls, affected her most deeply.[5](https://www.international.ucla.edu/apc/article/63757) • [6](https://yangruby.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Bloodofyingzhou_PressKit.pdf)
## Release and reception
The film premiered on June 14, 2006, at the Silverdocs documentary festival in [Silver Spring, Maryland](https://www.edgepedia.org/silver-spring-maryland), where it won the Grand Jury Award.[12](https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2006/06/23/us-filmmakers-help-bring-aids-out-of-the-shadows-in-china/b70dc8e1-0af1-4c24-b46c-72dcaf70b2b6/) It went on to win the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject at the 79th Academy Awards on February 25, 2007, the first Oscar for both Yang and Lennon; Lennon had previously been nominated for the feature documentary *The Battle Over Citizen Kane* (1995).[2](https://www.oscars.org/oscars/ceremonies/2007) • [6](https://yangruby.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Bloodofyingzhou_PressKit.pdf) Later honors included the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Award in 2009, an Audience Award at the 2007 Thessaloniki International Documentary Film Festival, a Humanitarian Award at the Chicago International Documentary Festival, and a Jury Prize at the 2007 DocumentaMadrid festival.[3](https://yangruby.com/the-blood-of-yingzhou-district/) • [13](https://yangruby.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/TheBloodOfYingzhouDistrict_TradCN-Presskit-20200813.pdf)
Chinese AIDS activists hoped the Oscar win would raise global concern about the under-reported epidemic in China. Li Dan, director of the China Orchard AIDS Project, said that when people mentioned AIDS they often thought of Africa, and that the film might direct more attention to the problem in China, though he considered the film too reserved about the mainland's situation, noting that areas such as Henan and Shanxi were in more dire straits than Yingzhou, which had long benefited from non-governmental organizations.[1](https://www.scmp.com/article/583039/aids-activists-hail-win-mainland-expose) After the award, the filmmakers announced plans for a series of public service announcements to raise HIV/AIDS awareness in rural China.[14](https://www.chinacsr.com/en/2007/02/27/1080-china-aids-movie-wins-academy-award/)
## Aftermath and Revisited
Within a decade of the film's making, conditions for its subjects had changed. Yingzhou (Fuyang) became what one report called a model town for AIDS prevention, with local AIDS orphans receiving free education and medication under a national campaign.[5](https://www.international.ucla.edu/apc/article/63757) Yang returned to the district to film *The Blood of Yingzhou District Revisited* (2013), which focused on a charitable boarding school where many of the same children either worked or lived and studied; scholars describe the sequel as a warmer account of the social and institutional changes that allowed the children to be cared for, educated, and integrated into Chinese society as they matured.[8](https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10085395/1/Lo_9780429507465.pdf)
## References
1. [Aids activists hail win for mainland expose, South China Morning Post (February 27, 2007)](https://www.scmp.com/article/583039/aids-activists-hail-win-mainland-expose)
2. [The 79th Academy Awards (2007), Oscars.org](https://www.oscars.org/oscars/ceremonies/2007)
3. [The Blood of Yingzhou District, Ruby Yang official site](https://yangruby.com/the-blood-of-yingzhou-district/)
4. [The blood of Yingzhou District, The Anton Library of Chinese Studies catalog](https://library.thebeijingcenter.org/cgi-bin/koha/opac-detail.pl?biblionumber=12904)
5. [UCLA Asia Pacific Center, "China's AIDS Orphans" (February 16, 2007)](https://www.international.ucla.edu/apc/article/63757)
6. [The Blood of Yingzhou District press kit, The China AIDS Media Project (March 1, 2007)](https://yangruby.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Bloodofyingzhou_PressKit.pdf)
7. ["Cinemax's Reel Life: The Blood of Yingzhou District," 2009 duPont-Columbia Award winner, Alfred I. duPont Awards](https://vimeo.com/29332600)
8. [Film and the Chinese Medical Humanities, UCL Discovery](https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10085395/1/Lo_9780429507465.pdf)
9. [The Blood of Yingzhou District, MIFF Film Archive](https://miff.com.au/festival-archive/films/12522/the-blood-of-yingzhou-district)
10. [扬子行动追踪"颍州的孩子" 孩子们现在好吗, Sina News (February 28, 2007)](https://news.sina.com.cn/o/2007-02-28/075011304040s.shtml)
11. [The Blood of Yingzhou District, TV Guide](https://www.tvguide.com/movies/the-blood-of-yingzhou-district/2030350318/)
12. [U.S. Filmmakers Help Bring AIDS Out of the Shadows in China, The Washington Post (June 22, 2006)](https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2006/06/23/us-filmmakers-help-bring-aids-out-of-the-shadows-in-china/b70dc8e1-0af1-4c24-b46c-72dcaf70b2b6/)
13. [The Blood of Yingzhou District press kit (Traditional Chinese)](https://yangruby.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/TheBloodOfYingzhouDistrict_TradCN-Presskit-20200813.pdf)
14. [China AIDS Movie Wins Academy Award, ChinaCSR.com (February 27, 2007)](https://www.chinacsr.com/en/2007/02/27/1080-china-aids-movie-wins-academy-award/)
15. [https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(06)69822-X/fulltext](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(06)69822-X/fulltext)
16. [http://www.bjreview.com/exclusive/txt/2007-02/08/content_56080_2.htm](http://www.bjreview.com/exclusive/txt/2007-02/08/content_56080_2.htm)
17. [https://www.chinachristiandaily.com/news/culture/2017-12-16/-interview-shooting-director-of-oscar-winner-blood-of-yingzhou-district-no-discrimination-against-aids-hiv-children-6466](https://www.chinachristiandaily.com/news/culture/2017-12-16/-interview-shooting-director-of-oscar-winner-blood-of-yingzhou-district-no-discrimination-against-aids-hiv-children-6466)
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*Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Films by genre, form, and subject › Documentary and biographical films › Individual documentary short films*
*Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026*
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License: Edgepedia Community License 1.0, https://www.edgepedia.org/edgepedia/license