The makers of a docudrama on Iris Chang, the Chinese American author of the New York Times bestseller The Rape of Nanking, say the film will be ready for release at the end of the year.

The producers told a press conference in Nanjing, formerly known as "Nanking", capital of east China's Jiangsu Province, that Iris Chang had finished shooting in China and would continue in Japan, the US, and Canada.

Its screening is scheduled to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the Nanjing Massacre.

The massacre occurred in December 1937 when Japanese troops occupied Nanjing, then capital of China. More than 300,000 Chinese were killed, one third of the city's buildings in the city were burned and more than 20,000 women were raped in eight weeks.

Worried that the West was forgetting the atrocity, Iris Chang compiled recollections from sources in China, Japan and North America and recorded them in her book, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, which became the first, full-length English-language narrative of the event to reach a wide audience.

Chang committed suicide at the age of 36 in 2004, after a battle with depression.

"Without Chang's outcry, the western world would not hear the victims in the massacre. Her passion shocked me, and shocked the world. I will try my best to play the lead role in the film," said Olivia Cheng, a Chinese Canadian actress who played Chang.

According to Bill Spahic, director of the film, the story is told from Chang's perspective, with no third-person narrative, to give a more striking impression of her personality.

The film is fully funded by Canadian independent production firm Reel Iris Productions, a partnership of Real to Reel Productions and the Canada Association for Learning and Preserving the History of World War II in Asia (ALPHA). Filming began in Nanjing in December 2006.
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(Xinhua News Agency March 31, 2007)