Under the Dome – Investigating China’s Smog (Censored in China) CC available

Former celebrity TV anchor Chai Jing quit her job after her baby daughter was born with a lung tumor, and after a year of rigorous investigation, launched this 1 hour 40 minute documentary about China’s smog: what is smog? Where does it come from? What do we do from here?

“In Beijing in 2014, I could only take her out when the air was good,” she says during a presentation to a studio audience that appears in the documentary. “There were 175 polluted days last year. That means that for half of the year, I had no choice but to keep her at home, shut in like a prisoner.”

Chai used $160,000 of her own money and one year to make Under The Dome, the same title as a Stephen King novel. Some scenes in the film are shocking, including a visit to a hospital operating room, where viewers see the damage China’s polluted air can do to a person’s lungs.

Chai asks some tough questions about the politics and economics behind the smog, but often with a gentle, funny tone.

She talks to a local environmental official so powerless to enforce the country’s laws that he admits, “I don’t want to open my mouth because I’m afraid you’ll see that I’m toothless.”