An award-winning documentary about the massacre carried out by
Japanese soldiers in the Chinese city of Nanjing is so vivid that
it left many members of the audience sobbing uncontrollably when it
was shown at a film festival in New York on Thursday.
The screening of the film, entitled Nanking (the old
spelling of the city's name), at the Tribeca Film Festival
coincides with the 70th anniversary of the invasion.
While some members of the audience shed tears silently in the
theater, others sobbed out loud.
Speaking after the film, one member of the audience said: "It is
really depressing to watch that chapter of history. Now I think I
can partially understand why Chinese American author Iris Chang
took her own life after finishing her book The Rape of
Nanking."
Nanking tells the story of the Japanese invasion of the
present capital city of east China's Jiangsu Province, in the early days of World
War II. At that time, Nanking was the capital of China and as part
of a campaign to conquer all of China the Japanese subjected it to
months of aerial bombardment. When the city fell, the Japanese army
engaged in murder and rape on a horrific scale.
In the midst of the rampage, a small group of Westerners banded
together to establish a safety zone where more than 200,000 Chinese
found refuge. Unarmed, these missionaries, university professors,
doctors, and businessmen including a German member of the Nazi
party bore witness to the events, while risking their own lives to
protect civilians from the slaughter.
The story is told through deeply moving interviews with Chinese
survivors, chilling archival footage and photos of the events, and
the testimonies of former Japanese soldiers.
The events became familiar to the film's producer, Ted Leonsis,
who is also vice-chairman of AOL, in early 2005 when he stumbled
across Iris Chang's obituary. It inspired him to read her book,
which shocked him so much that he decided the story had to be told
on screen.
Original sources
In the summer of 2005, Leonsis hired the Academy-Award-winning
writer/ director team of Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman to lead his
project.
To find the materials that would bring the story of Nanking to
life, Guttentag, Sturman and their production team collected
thousands of pages of letters, journals and diaries for three
months by trawling original sources and archives in the United
States, Europe and Asia.
In December 2005, co-producer Violet Du Feng traveled to Nanjing
to meet more than 30 survivors. When Leonsis, Guttentag and
Sturman, and the rest of the production team arrived in China, they
spent three weeks interviewing 22 survivors in the cities of
Nanjing, Suzhou and Shanghai.
Filming in Japan was more difficult because the subject of
Nanking is highly controversial. Those who participated in the film
were found through members of the Japanese peace movement.
On returning from Asia, the production team began the final
piece of filming the staged reading with actors. Filming took place
in Los Angeles last August.
Their efforts were not in vain. In January, the documentary
debuted at the Sundance Film Festival where it received the Editing
Award. In April, it won the Humanitarian Award for Best Documentary
at the Hong Kong International Film Festival.
To this day, some ultra-conservatives in Japan continue to deny
or minimize the scale of the Nanking Massacre and pay annual
pilgrimages to the Yasukuni Shrine where 14 Japanese class A war
criminals are enshrined.
In the run-up to December, the 70th anniversary of the invasion
of Nanking, the Chinese and Japanese governments have convened a
joint committee of historians in an attempt to agree on a common
version of the history of the Sino-Japanese conflict, including
what happened in Nanking.
"It is time to repent. Denial will only lead to more mistakes,"
said another member of the audience.
(Xinhua News Agency May 5, 2007)
