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NANKING Send This Review to a Friend
Atrocities keep piling up in the world, but among the most appalling in the last century was the rape of Nanking by Japanese occupiers who stormed into the city in 1937 with death and destruction also marked by ruthless raping of women. Some have put the number of rapes at 20,000. To this day Japan not come to terms with this part of history and authorities have denied what has been amply documented.
With their new documentary, “Nanking,” filmmakers Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman have reminded the world of the barbarities. Their method is to combine film footage existing from that period with statements by actors speaking the words of persons there at the time and giving testament to what occurred. For example, as a Christian missionary and head of a college education department, Minnie Vautrin managed to save many potential victims. Her words are spoken by Mariel Hemingway. Woody Harrelson, Jürgen Prochnow, and Hugo Armstrong are other stand-ins.
The film also is enriched by actual persons who lived through the terror, such as one former Japanese soldier who expresses regret at what he did personally. There are many scenes showing the victimization, and one comes away from the film with a sense of the terrible ordeal inflicted upon Nanking during the Japanese invasion of China, and the need to remember. But given the atrocities that still take place elsewhere, one doesn’t leave with any confidence that such brutality will never be repeated in some part of the globe. As “Nanking” demonstrates, the capacity for inhumanity seems bottomless. A THINKFlm and HBO Documentary Films release.
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