City of Life and Death
Director: Lu Chuan
Genre: Black-and-white, Drama, History, War, World cinema
Year: 2009
Country: China, Hong Kong
Language: Standard Mandarin, Japanese Language
Starring: Liu Ye, Gao Yuanyuan, Fan Wei, Hideo Nakaizumi, John Paisley, Yuko Miyamoto, Bin Liu, Yiyan Jiang, Ryu Kohata, Beverly Peckous
City of Life and Death (Chinese: 南京! 南京!; pinyin: Nánjīng! Nánjīng!) is a 2009 Chinese film directed by Lu Chuan, marking his third feature film. The film deals with the Battle of Nanjing and its aftermath (commonly referred to as "The Rape of Nanking" or the "Nanking Massacre") during the Second Sino-Japanese War. The film is also known as Nanking! Nanking! or Nanjing! Nanjing!.
While originally slated for a 2008 release, the director-general of the Chinese Film Bureau announced in September that the film would be delayed to an early 2009 release. The film was eventually released on April 22, 2009 where it became a box-office success, earning RMB150m (approximately 20 million dollars) in its first two and a half weeks alone.
City of Life and Death takes place in 1937, shortly after the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War. The Imperial Japanese Army has just captured the temporary capital of the Republic of China, Nanjing. What followed is now known as the Nanking Massacre, a period of several weeks wherein massive numbers of Chinese prisoners of war and civilians were killed.
Commander Lu leads a small Chinese unit of regular and irregular combatants in defensive
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"Lu Chuan's remarkable and very moving film chronicles 'the rape of Nanking' by the invading Japanese army in 1937 as a series of telling vignettes.
Nanjing (previously known as Nanking) was China's capital in the 1930s, until the government and army withdrew to inland areas at the end of 1937 as the invading Japanese Imperial Army advanced. Over the following three months, countless Nanjing civilians were massacred; there were also many sexual assaults and the city was laid to waste. To this day, some in Japan are in denial about what happened. There have been several earlier Chinese movies about 'the rape of Nanjing', all full of tears, indomitable bravery and nationalist rhetoric. Lu Chuan's stunning film is the long overdue corrective. As you'd expect from the director of Kekexili: Mountain Patrol, the approach is unorthodox. There's no overarching story, except for the fall of the city itself; the film is built from vignettes which alternate the broader picture with close-ups of individual lives and deaths. We follow three characters in particular: a young Chinese soldier who leads a doomed resistance group that includes children, a confused Japanese private who loses his virginity to a 'comfort woman', and the harried Chinese secretary of a German missionary. Lu lets faces tell much of the story. The tone, inevitably, is elegiac."
Quoting Tony Rayns
Internet Movie Database