Nanking

If I am going to recommend a documentary, then Nanking will be it. The Rape of Nanking just prior to World War II is examined in this film, which contains real stock footage of clips smuggled out of China during the time of Japanese occupation. Interviews with surviving Chinese victims, and a number of Japanese Imperial Army soldiers who took part in the campaign, are conducted by the filmmakers, and it is always chilling to learn from them first hand, on their respective perspective of those horrible years of the Japanese invasion of China.

You will definitely squirm at the tearful, vivid recollection of atrocities from rapes, shootings, knifing from bayonets, and even burning, while the archive clips bring to screen scenes and pictures of such barbaric acts. Tales of plundering, looting, the forceful taking away of young men to be shot and young girls or boys, children even, for brutal rape, are told with an unflinching eye. In fact, nothing is re-enacted in this film, opting instead for actors (such as Woody Harrelson, Mariel Hemmingway and Michelle Krusiec) to portray real historical characters and only as narrators of their personal diaries and memoirs of their stay in Nanking during the invasion and subsequent occupation.

While the rest of the world stood by and did nothing, a handful of foreigners who opted to stay in the city, did what they could by organizing themselves and setting up a Safety Zone for the Chinese refugees, using all the power that they could (which was very little, save for the fact that they are foreigners) to protect their charges from the looting, plundering, killing and rape that takes place on a regular basis outside their zone. And it is indeed this Zone which had saved thousands of lives, that this documentary paid a sort of tribute to.

If this is an anti-war picture, then I'd say it would have done a very good job, highlighting the immense amount of evil that man is capable of inflicting on fellow man. Even up until today, the Massacre of Nanjing is still hotly debated, especially on the number of unfortunate casualties and victims, and the enshrinement of war criminals which have irked the Chinese.

As a Chinese, I knew the Nanking massacre when I was young. I was frightened when I saw so many horrible pictures taken at that time. When I learned that the film Nanking would be shown, I was hesitated. I should watch it because I'm a Chinese, but I didn't have the nerve. I didn't have the nerve to see my countrymen being butchered most brutally and I didn't want to arouse the sad memories.

After a week of hesitation, I went to the cinema and watched it finally. I really want to know more about the truth. When I was sitting in the cinema and watching, my tears kept rolling down. I felt my heart so cold and my head so painful. I feel so painful for my countrymen at that time and so moved by the foreigners who risked their own lives for saving the innocent and helpless Chinese.

The massacre did happened. No one can deny. I appreciated Ms Chang who bravely wrote the book and the directors of this movie. It tells the truth yet does not arouse the hatred. A sentence in the movie impressed me a great deal, it approximately goes like this: We don't make you to hate the Japanese, we want you to know how horrible war is.

Yes, we hate war and love peace.

I imagine it's hard enough to make a compelling documentary with those depicted being alive. That said, when those whose diaries are the basis for said documentary have long since passed on it must be a minor miracle if the project works in even a small way. Oh, yes add in that few people cared at the time the actual events occurred, either by ignorance or indifference, and that very same lack of interest still exists today...So, why bother? Perhaps, because it has been said that a society who fails to recognize its mistakes is doomed to repeat them. If you believe in this simple premise then how can we not properly acknowledge what the Japanese did, while the world watched, even this many years later. Every generation needs to learn from our collective history and I believe this movie is an important tool in that lesson.

More to the point of Nanking. It is not in any way meant to be any kind of definitive documentary of all events that were related to the Japanese destruction of Nanking and therefore should not be examined as such. It tells the story of the few, the foreigners, in a very narrow time period who were responsible for the preservation of at least a quarter of a million Chinese refugees who would have most certainly been massacred. It does this by a uniquely artistic device of using some living survivors interspersed with actors portraying those who are dead yet are able to tell their stories using wording right from their diaries. By understanding that the words are the actual words of these deceased people who saved lives against the fiercest evil more than validates this approach for this viewer.

I want to recommend this movie to those interested in the atrocities of war as it relates to history and who we are and should be. All civilized humanity should fight for justice and never sit idly by as evil goes about it's business unchecked. When we sit back and do nothing evil flourishes as history proved all to well in the next seven or eight years as more Japanese and Nazi atrocities mounted. This movie reminds us of that and as such is not a "hate letter" to any sect, but shows the human capacity for both evil and good. It's our mandate to make sure good wins and I find this documentary effectively states this. Important and timely, highly recommended.

In 1937, the ancient capital of China, Nanking, was surrounded by the expansionist troops of Japan. For many days, the city was bombed until it was forced to surrender. Then, in an act of evil barbarism, the Japanese entered the town and executed 10s of thousands of prisoners of war. I have read about this incident in Iris Chang's "THE RAPE OF NANKING" and in this book as well as in this documentary, surviving Japanese soldiers rationalized this as "necessary" and that they "had no choice since they couldn't feed all these prisoners"! One even seemed to smile and laugh about it in the documentary--at which point I found myself ready to scream at the screen! That's because no matter how you try to justify this massacre, what happened next is subhuman and evil, as half the city was butchered--men, women and children. Young women, old women, children and even boys were repeatedly raped, then murdered. Living noncombatants were used for bayonet practice and Japanese officers had contests to see how many and how quickly they could behead these civilians! It was indeed a holocaust, though sadly today few recall that it occurred--including MANY within Japan itself.

This story of the fall and rape of the city of Nanking in 1937 by the Japanese is explained in this film using an unusual combination of interviews with survivors, film footage, photos and recreations of the voices of witnesses to the horror who are now long dead. One reviewer thought that the way they had actors portraying the dead Western witnesses to the slaughter was tacky, but I am not sure how else they could have done this effectively. Regardless of how it was constructed, the topic was so gut-wrenching and sad that the film couldn't help but be a very emotionally draining documentary. This is not fun to watch, but also very necessary lest we forget.

If I had any criticism of the film is that perhaps it wasn't quite graphic enough--though it was very graphic. I've seen film and photos that were worse than many of the ones used in the film. I've also seen interviews with evil ex-soldiers in Japan today who contend that none of this is true or make excuses--even though there are boxes of evidence to the contrary (such as many photos soldiers took with "trophies" that were then sent to their families--these "trophies" were rows of severed Chinese heads for which they were responsible).

By the way, I mentioned Ms. Chang's book and I learned that not too long after writing it, Ms. Change committed suicide. That is a great loss and you wonder what the impact her research had on this.

I saw the film at Sundance as part of a packed house for a third or fourth screening. I've seen the story of Nanking depicted before but never with the confidence I had that this was how it really was. It was like watching three Shindlers save the Chinese, and Spielberg's Shoa, all rolled into one perfect film. A panel of actors speak the lines from letters and diaries of European/American witnesses and Chinese and Japanese survivors tell their stories themselves on film. It's not just a narrator interpreting the events - it's the voices of the people who were there. The story line is well honed accompanied by stills, 16 mm smuggled out by one of the foreigners, and the actors provide voice for the foreigners. It is an incredibly moving and informative film. I sat next to two couples, two Japanese American men married to Chinese American women. One wife had seen the film the night before, and our night she brought everyone else back with her. I spoke with one of the husbands and he said that out of scale of 5 he gave it a 7. For the rest of the week I ran into others who saw the film and everyone said that they thought it was the best documentary they had ever seen in their lives. I totally agree.