In English and Mandarin with English and Chinese subtitles
Genre: Documentary
Director: Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman
Cast: Hugo Armstrong, Mariel Hemingway, Woody
Harrelson, John Getz, Stephen Dorff
RunTime: 1 hr 30 mins
Released By: GV
Rating: NC-16
Official Website: http://www.nankingthefilm.com
Opening Day: 6 December 2007
Synopsis:
A powerful, emotional and relevant reminder of the heartbreaking
toll war takes on the innocent, Nanking tells the story of
the Japanese invasion of Nanking, China, in the early days
of World War II. As part of a campaign to conquer all of China,
the Japanese subjected Nanking – which was then China’s
capital – to months of aerial bombardment, and when
the city fell, the Japanese army unleashed murder and rape
on a horrifying scale. In the midst of the rampage, a small
group of Westerners banded together to establish a Safety
Zone where over 200,000 Chinese found refuge. Unarmed, these
missionaries, university professors, doctors and businessmen
– including a Nazi named John Rabe – bored witness
to the events, while risking their own lives to protect civilians
from slaughter.
The
story is told through deeply moving interviews with Chinese
survivors, chilling archival footage and photos of the events,
and testimonies of former Japanese soldiers. At the heart
of Nanking is a filmed stage reading of the Westerners’
letters and diaries, featuring Woody Harrelson, Mariel Hemingway
and Jurgen Prochnow. Through its interweave of archival images,
testimonies of survivors, and readings of first hand accounts,
the film puts the viewer on the streets of Nanking and brings
the forgotten past to startling life.
Nanking
is a testament to the courage and conviction of individuals
who were determined to act in the face of evil and a powerful
tribute to the resilience of the Chinese people – a
gripping account of light in the darkest of times.
Movie Review:
“Nanking” is a film that derives a devastating
power from its staid remembrance of humanity’s capacity
for suffering, its capacity for evil and its capacity for
good. It catalogues one of the most horrifying events in the
history of the continent. As an overture for the Second World
War, the Rape of Nanking was hell on earth. Nanking, the then
bustling capital of China, was savagely brutalised by the
invading Japanese military force in the summer of 1937. First,
the air raids began tearing through the city’s economy,
devastating the lives of its citizens, leaving them helpless
to the inevitable slaughter by the approaching troops. As
the city’s expatriates and those with money scurried
to flee, a foreign contingent made up of the clergy, teachers
and professionals stayed behind to protect and aid the destitute.
Directors
Bill Guttentag and Bill Sturman pay tribute to those 22 men
and women whose courage and kindness enabled them to establish
a provisional safety zone that provided refuge for over 200,000
civilians, despite being outnumbered by a belligerent army
angered at having the “eyes of the world” on them.
Somewhere between being a cogent docudrama of heroism and
a harrowingly powerful documentary of an unfathomable catastrophe,
the vivid characterisations of these Americans and Europeans
are crafted through the film’s well-envisioned and excellently
staged readings by its weathered performers that include:
Woody Harrelson, Mariel Hemingway, Stephen Dorff and most
notably Jurgen Prochnow. The letters and anecdotes of the
expatriate saviours that provide the point-by-point narration
carries with it a cutting, painful urgency and is delivered
with compelling ideas of responsibility and personal anguish
by the thespians and various composite characters.
Much
of the film’s haunting intensity comes from its use
stock footage to recall the horrors of the past. The seamlessly
inducted black and white archival footage of wartime atrocities
capture the sorrow and ad hoc sentiments of people long gone,
even as their cries and pain linger and reverberate throughout
history. It adds to its sentience by summoning the voices
and memories of Chinese survivors, their tears and pained
expressions leading the way to the film’s most enduring
interviews. When one interviewee recalls how his mother breastfed
his infant brother even as she was dying from being bayoneted
through the chest, this anecdote ominously carries with it
the burden of indescribable truth and inexplicable iniquity
and a discovery of unknown depths of madness. Then the interviews
with the surviving Japanese soldiers show remorselessness
and the descriptions of the matter-of-fact executions and
acts of depravity convey a sense that living through the war
has changed these men irreparably. The footage and interviews
show how the perspectives seen through the eyes of humanity
are reconfigured during times of war when sin becomes justified
and decency is abandoned.
The
shared human consciousness between the foreigners and ravaged
citizenry is indelibly considered in Prochnow’s recital
of the German businessman and Nazi sympathiser John Rabe’s
journal entry, a detail from memory made fecund by time: "Shouldn't
one make an attempt to help them? There's a question of morality
here, and so far I haven't been able to sidestep it."
This
pronouncement is a scathing indictment of the denials, and
of the deliberate obscuration of truths so oppressive that
it is met with ethical and universal repercussions. The preclusions
of accountability are present even today, as other parts of
the world are mired in invasions, Rabe’s conundrum is
still a relevant inquiry that is responded with an uncomfortable
silence.
Movie
Rating:
(Stunningly powerful documentary filmmaking and an elegant
monument to its heroes)
Review
by Justin Deimen
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