Children of the Stars (2009)

The documentary "Children of the Stars" focuses on the Feng Jia Wei family. Their five year old boy is autistic. He cannot speak and is often very violent. He has been rejected from all their local schools and does not seem to even recognise his parents. As a family, they frequently receive verbal abuse from people who do not understand their son's behaviour. The career of both parents has also been destroyed because their son requires constant care and attention. The family feel they have nowhere else to turn and as their future looks so bleak, they have been harboring a dark plan of suicide. Their last real chance lies in a course offered by a little charity school in Beijing called "Stars and Rain". Here, they hope to master new behavioral techniques that will enable them to teach and manage their son. Then perhaps he can make enough progress to be accepted into a regular local school. If they fail, then the outlook for all of them is grim. The family make the long journey to Beijing and the film follows them as they take a deeply moving journey through the eleven weeks of the course. It is an extraordinary story of parental love as they fight to give a future to their son.