Their camera follows the demonstrators as they stream right past Jiang on his knees and force their way through a cordon of People's Armed Police, pushing and punching, brandishing the death photos like talismans. Uniformed and plain-clothes cops ring the demonstrators on both sides, taking photographs and videos, while security officials anxiously stride along trying to figure out how to bring things to a stop. Finally, the demonstrators are coaxed onto buses with the promise of an official, "technical" report on school construction.

Alpert's camera follows the parents onto the bus and back to their farms and homesteads, with a series of heart-wrenching clips as they talk about their lost children - in most cases, their only child, mandated by China's strict one-child policy. Many of the scenes are quietly heartbreaking. The film contains no editorialising or voice-overs; the soundtrack is entirely in Chinese (with English subtitles) in Alpert's trademark cinéma-vérité - a sparse, evocative style that has won him 15 Emmy awards. Their filming came to an abrupt halt when the police closed in on them in a parking garage, bundled them off to a police station and grilled them for eight hours, confiscating what footage they were carrying. Alpert had wisely shipped out the critical demonstration footage and most of his parent interviews the day before.

This crackdown was the opening shot in Beijing's comprehensive media blackout on the Sichuan school collapse scandal. The Ministry of Public Security later used police videos to identify and track down the demonstrators one by one at home - especially the "ringleaders" - to intimidate or bribe them into public silence. Several parents who obtained blueprints of collapsed schools and compared them to the actual ruins, thereby proving shoddy construction methods, were later arrested on grounds of "possessing state secrets".