A US film chronicling Japan's notorious 1937 invasion of the
Chinese city Nanjing and massacre of its residents will hit screens
in Beijing, Shanghai, Wuxi and other Chinese cities from Saturday,
the 70th anniversary of the atrocity.
The 90-minute documentary is in English with Chinese subtitles.
Titled starkly Nanking (the old name for Nanjing), it
features interviews with Chinese survivors and Japanese soldiers,
along with pictures, letters, and diaries read by actors portraying
westerners who helped save more than 200,000 Chinese refugees in
Nanjing in 1937.
"I felt that the massacre had largely been ignored by history,
and that the words 'forgotten' and 'massacre' did not belong
together. I hope we can tell people the truth," said Bill Guttentag
in Shanghai Thursday.
The Nanjing Massacre occurred in December 1937 when Japanese
troops occupied the then capital of China. More than 300,000
Chinese are believed to have been murdered and thousands raped.
"We hope Chinese audiences will respect the validity of our
approach," said Guttentag, who shot the film with partner Dan
Sturman in 2005.
The idea came from Ted Leonsis, vice chairman of America Online,
who came across an obituary of a young writer named Iris Chang who
wrote the best-selling book "The Rape of Nanking."
Leonsis bought the book and was startled to discover a tragedy
he had never heard of. He decided to use two million US dollars of
his own money to shoot a documentary film on the Nanking Massacre,
and invited the Academy Award-winning writer/director team of Bill
Guttentag and Dan Sturman to co-direct the project.
Leonsis revealed his motivation in his blog: "As someone who has
always believed in the power of goodness, I wanted to do something
to share this story with others, and so I put together a research
and production team, and decided to fund this movie and serve as
its producer."
Guttentag adopted the angle of a handful of brave westerners who
worked in horrific circumstances to save the lives of several
hundred thousand Chinese civilians.
Guttentag and his crew visited six countries over a period of
eight months to collect video, audio and written materials.
"I felt very nervous, because I'm a foreigner, and this is a
story about Chinese. I had to ensure that every single detail was
true."
The crew interviewed 240 living Japanese soldiers, six of whom
appear in the film, the youngest being almost 90 years old.
Guttentag also interviewed 30 Nanjing massacre survivors. He is
still haunted by the story of Zhang Zhiqiang, who was only 9 years
old back in 1937. After his mother was killed by a Japanese
soldier, he remembers his baby brother trying to suck the breasts
of his mother covered in blood.
"The translators lost their voices... they could not go on,"
said Guttentag, adding that the work had taken a big emotional toll
on the film crew.
The film has received numerous plaudits including an accolade
from Reuters who called it a "beautifully crafted film...(that)
honors the highest calling of documentary filmmaking."
Beijing's cinemas have 8 copies of the film and Shanghai has
ordered 18.
But so far no Japanese distributors have approached the Nanking
production team to express an interest in distributing the
documentary in Japan.
"Our film isn't an anti-Japanese film. It is an anti-war film,"
said Guttentag.
(Xinhua News Agency July 7, 2007)