With startling access and devastating honesty, The Red Race tracks the plight of Chinese child gymnasts who are being groomed for Olympic stardom – but at what cost? Six-year-old boys and girls are forced to build unnatural muscle and constantly perform grueling routines. A young girl sobs while being made to hold a handstand, her coach screaming in a shrill voice for her to stop crying. Children barely old enough to write and led to sign contracts that will bind them to their sports. Stressed-out coaches are told they will lose their jobs, and parents worry about their children’s futures if the youngsters aren't successful. Without narration, this documentary weaves together the stories of the children, families and coaches enmeshed in the Shanghai gymnastics world with stark imagery and bold implications. And yet, the most remarkable aspect of the film is the children themselves, who somehow manage to maintain their innocence despite immense pressures put upon them. The Red Race is a poignant, heartbreaking look into the ruthless world of Chinese gymnastics, framed against a subtle undercurrent of national identity. For a beautifully shot, tenderly rendered, but shocking look at the making of perfection in the world’s most populous country, The Red Race receives a Peabody Award. (68th George Foster Peabody Award)

Unique! The Red Race is the most smashing movie in that section. (Zagreb Film Festival)

This tiny little film perfectly captures the paradoxes and myths of the Chinese Olympic juggernaut in its training regimes for children. Seeing the Machine’s toll on the small faces of exhausted, crying children is a revelatory snapshot of a nation’s insistence on dominance and a testimony to its poor citizens and their obligations to the state. (Calgary Film Festival)

The Red Race is the best sports documentary to play SIFF since The Heart of the Game, one of the best I’ve seen in a decade…There is a single, static shot in this movie, that contains more drama than anything I’ve seen on film this year: Two girls, aged about eight, in a contest to see who can hang longest from a bar. It’s excruciating to watch, because—as both girls know—the one who releases her grip first may drop farther than the floor. (Seattle Weekly)

A revelatory, often brutally unblinking documentary. Though interest in the item will spike in the run-up to the Olympic Games in Beijing, the tender age of these mercilessly driven children and cool, classical style ensure the pic's relevance and shelf life whenever such competishes are mounted.An award-winning documentarian and nonfiction director/editor at Shanghai Media Group, the helmer is smart, and brave, enough to strip the film of narrative fat: no voiceovers, no formal identification of participants. Though disorienting, the strategy further dehumanizes participants, underscoring the idea that basic dignity and individualism have been removed from the process.(Variety)

With a keen emphasis on composition and rhythm, Director Chao Gan astutely presents the harsh life of kindergarten-aged gymnasts at China's Youth Athletic School, where grueling training and ferocious competition break down children in order to build up the next Olympic champions. (Hamptons International Film Festival)

让人震惊且深思的杰作。 另一个中国社会「弑子」的故事。(台湾纪录片双年展)