Round Eyes in the Middle Kingdom is a 1995 documentary directed by Ronald Levaco, an American filmmaker who journeyed back to China, the nation of his boyhood days, to discover what became of an old friend of his family, Israel Epstein.
Ronald Levaco seeks the reasoning behind the answer to this question: why would a Jew from Poland fight for Communist rule in China under the direction of Mao Zedong?
Round Eyes in the Middle Kingdom allows viewers to meet a man who experienced life directly under Mao's rule and lived through the Cultural Revolution, issues which most people from the Western hemisphere are not familiar with.
Israel Epstein and the director's father (Mr. Levaco senior) grew up in China, where they experienced comfortable lifestyles afforded to well off families from Western nations, in the time period before the Communists began to govern.
The scenes of the country's poverty were impossible to ignore: as a young boy, Epstein witnessed ordinary Chinese families, tormented by famine, put their offspring up for sale and perish due to severe lack of food.
While the name refers directly to the sunglasses foreigners wear and the lack of the epicanthic fold in many Europeans, it is also an innuendo, metaphorically, at the naiveté of the outsiders who only through a haze saw the nation they were living in.