The short movie splices footages of a small-format camera, which has tracked the life of six orphans who lost their parents to AIDS in Yingzhou, Anhui Province, for a year. Some rural areas in this province were subjected to underground blood collection in the 1990s, which caused a manmade catastrophe of rampant AIDS transmission among poor farmers, unbeknown to the community. The 39-minute movie demonstrated that the stigmas of the disease and the financial burden of getting medical treatment destroy the traditional close family ties and make the AIDS orphans--the healthy and the infected alike--even more miserable.

Gao Jun, a toddler featured in The Blood of Yingzhou District, was infected with the virus through mother to child transmission during pregnancy. The baby became dumb after the death of his parents. But nobody cared whether he spoke or not. His grandmother, who lived with the orphan and suffered from great depression from the death of her beloved son, could hardly keep the baby properly fed and clothed.

In the documentary, Gao displays none of the traits of a child his age. In one scene, he kicks a pig raised by the family, the only playmate he has, with a hatred in his eyes far too fierce for one so young. After Gao's grandmother dies, his closest surviving kin--his two uncles--are supposed to take in the young boy as Chinese tradition demands. But each uncle wrestles with a dilemma. The older uncle thinks about the consequences of Gao playing with his own children and how they will be ostracized by terrified neighbors. The younger uncle is worried that as long as Gao remains in his house, he will struggle to find a wife.

At one point, Gao is adopted by a couple who are HIV-positive. Under the loving care of his foster parents, the baby speaks his first word in front of the camera. "I'll hit you," he blurts out, joyfully running after the son of the foster family, who is years older than him. One scene features the young boy in the arms of his foster father on the way to welcome his daughter back from school. Rape flowers in hand, Gao repeats word after word what his foster father tells him, "Sister, I want to give you flowers." Yet as Gao blooms in the love of his new family, his happiness is short-lived. He becomes so sick that the foster family is forced to give him up and the audience last sees him walking away down a dirt road.

Fourteen-year-old AIDS patient Ren Nannan, was shunned by relatives and lived with her healthy elder sister "Little Flower" without adult supervision after their parents died from AIDS. Unable to bear the stigma associated with the disease, Ren's sister leaves home to seek employment without informing Nan'nan, which breaks the young girl's heart. Although Ren's health takes a turn for the better after she begins a course of AIDS medication, nothing means more to her than when "Little Flower" returns home for her wedding.

Ren's story reaches its climax on "Little Flower's" wedding day. Against a backdrop of practical jokes played by Ren, "Little Flower," who intentionally conceals Ren's HIV status from her in-laws, is tortured inside by the decision she has made to once again leave her sister.

Making a difference

Yang had the idea of doing a personal film on AIDS orphans in China in late 2002, and only managed to secure funding to get it started in 2004, when she and her colleague Thomas Lennon [the producer of The Blood of Yingzhou District] were on the verge of giving up.

Although The Blood of Yingzhou District is CAMP's first effort to reach an international audiences, Yang wants to get a very simple message through to foreign and Chinese audiences alike: to ask people to discard the stigmas associated with AIDS and give more care to the AIDS orphans in China.

"The blood in the title has a double meaning," said Yang, who gave the film its title. "The movie is about blood relationships: even your own relatives would shun you [if you were infected] due to the stigma and prejudice against the disease. The second meaning is that children got the disease through blood during mother-to-child transmission."

Handling several media projects on AIDS at the same time, Yang could only find time for one field trip to Yingzhou. When she witnessed the living conditions, it tore her apart.