Film

Designed as an unofficial companion piece to the late Iris Chang’s best-seller The Rape of Nanking, this powerful documentary examines Japan’s 1937–38 campaign of terror against the Chinese capital. Relying on testimony, archival footage and the writings of Western residents who sheltered Chinese civilians (sonorously read by the likes of Mariel Hemingway, Woody Harrelson and Jürgen Prochnow), Nanking provides a straightforward account of an atrocity that remains underacknowledged in Japan.

Like Schindler’s List, the film focuses as much on the saviors as the persecuted, and it may be that approaching the material from their perspective enables the directors to take a broader view. By creating a “Safety Zone,” the Western characters (including a surgeon, the dean of a girls’ college and a Schindler-like Nazi businessman) reportedly saved 250,000.

Telling their own story, Chinese survivors recall seeing parents and siblings murdered before their eyes. Some of the most disturbing accounts come from former Japanese soldiers, who discuss rape and slaughter in disquietingly matter-of-fact terms.

Leaning heavily on violins, Nanking is ultimately more effective as documentation than as filmmaking. But when the subject is widespread indifference to human life, documentation is enough.