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During the latest years, a number of documentaries and films regarding the issue of “comfort women”, which has even been causing political friction between Japan and a number of neighboring countries, including China and S. Korea. Ke Guo’s “Twenty Two” deals with the same subject after his short “Thirty Two” and is the most commercially successful effort of all, since, upon its release in China in September 2017, it became the country’s highest-grossing and most-popular documentary of all time.

“Twenty Two” is streaming on Mubi

At the time of the initial shooting of the documentary in 2015, only 22 of the 200,000 Chinese victims forced into sexual slavery during World War II remained alive. After the movie was re-edited and received mainland China release in 2017, only 8 of those 22 still remain. The first edition was shown at several film festivals. The new version is a 99-minute cut and it was edited by famous editor Ching-Song Liao.

One of most sensitive topics in regional Far East Asian politics these days, Japan's use of comfort women during the wane of its colonial empire is a constant talking point on the news. Among the more sobering and least sentimental treatments of the subject to come about in the last few years, Guo Ke's Chinese documentary Twenty Two (which was co-produced with Korea) sought out the 22 remaining comfort women in China, the last survivors of a group that numbered some 200,000 at its peak during Word Word II. Though handsomely shot and poignant at times, Guo's work is also marred by a certain amount of lethargy. Some of the atrocities recounted by the former comfort women are heart-wrenching and rendered effective by being shown...

[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]...