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Product Detail |
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Audio Format: Dolby True HD 7.1 / Dolby Digital 5.1
Video Format: Widescreen 1.77:1 (Anamorphic) + 1920 x 1080p FULL HD
Languages: Mandarin
Subtitles: English, Chinese (T/S)
Region Code: A
Year Made: 2009
Running Time: 135
Release Date: 10/29/2009
In 1937, Chengxian brought his Japanese wife and children to Nanking. Japanese invasion separated this family. When Chengxian and his pregnant wife reunited in the security zone, several hundreds Japanese soldiers broke through the barricades of the security zone, killing the foreigners and advanced towards the helpless women & children...
No words can describe the horrors chronicled in City of Life and Death, a dramatic recount of the Rape of Nanking. Directed by Lu Chuan (Kekexili: Mountain Patrol), the film takes an unflinching look at the atrocities that took place during a six-week period starting December 1937, where mass amount of Chinese civilians were executed by the Japanese army, and where thousands and thousands of women were captured and raped, in the fallen capital of China.
Bearing a concise yet aptly emphatic Chinese title of Nanking! Nanking!, the film is artistically accomplished and emotionally gripping. Nevertheless, the director’s greatest achievement is to let the events unfold by themselves, in a matter-of-fact manner. Remarkably for a Chinese film on the subject, City dwells on neither sentimental excess nor nationalist indignation, and has even incorporated the perspective of a Japanese soldier amongst its major characters.
Emerging from the devastated landscape, there’s Liu Ye as a resistance fighter looking death in the face; there’s Fan Wei as a German humanitarian’s assistant, walking the fine line between family protector and traitor; there’s Gao Yuanyuan as a refugee camp supervisor, risking her life to save others; and then there’s Hideo Nakaizumi’s Japanese soldier, going through the motions of the invasion while quietly shaken by the inhumanity surrounding him.
Shot austerely in black and white, City’s elliptical narrative witnesses its characters’ quest for dignity, amid spiritual disenchantment and the most extreme of circumstances. This is not one of the movies that set out with an anti-war message yet inadvertently glamorise violence in the name of nationalism. The film has only visualised a small portion of the atrocities, and by the standard of war films and the outrageous brutality demonstrated in actual historical records, the images here are almost discreet to a fault.
Without victimising or demonizing his characters, Lu suggests that the irrationality of wars is a confounding experience to both sides of the conflict. As an instant landmark in Chinese cinema, City of Life and Death is a heart-wrenching reflection on the national trauma; as a universal reminder on what it means to be human, it is disturbing, moving, and ultimately, hauntingly profound.
Special Features
- Behind the scenes
- Movie Trailer
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