City of Life and Death

Shot in stark black-and-white, this film depicts the fall of Nanjing to the Imperial Japanese Army and the ensuing weeks of massacre, following Chinese soldiers, civilians, foreign residents, and a conflicted Japanese soldier. It portrays both the horror inflicted on the city and fragmented acts of humanity within the atrocity.

The Nanjing Massacre, following the Japanese capture of the Chinese capital in December 1937, saw widespread killing, rape, and looting over roughly six weeks. Estimates of the death toll range from around 40,000 to over 300,000, and the events remain a source of historical and diplomatic controversy between China and Japan.

The film is a dramatized composite rather than a documentary account, and its sympathetic portrayal of a Japanese soldier's remorse proved controversial in China.

After the fall of Shanghai, Japanese forces advanced up the Yangtze and captured the Chinese capital, following it with weeks of mass killing and rape of civilians and disarmed soldiers.

Chinese defences collapsed on 12–13 December 1937. A small group of Western residents established the Nanjing Safety Zone, which sheltered a substantial part of the remaining civilian population. Estimates of the dead vary widely between Chinese, Japanese and Western scholarship.

Directed by Lu Chuan

Cast: Liu Ye, Nakaizumi Hideo, Gao Yuanyuan, Fan Wei

Positioned at December 1937 – January 1938 within the Second Sino-Japanese War phase of the war, as part of the Nanjing Campaign. This is entry 8 of 150 in the chronological archive.

• Nanjing Massacre
• Japanese occupation
• war crimes
• Nanjing Safety Zone
• civilian suffering

• 

  The Flowers of War

  December 1937

• 

  John Rabe

  November 1937 – February 1938

• 

  The Eight Hundred

  26 October – 1 November 1937

• 

  Devils on the Doorstep

  1944–1945

• 

  The Children of Huang Shi

  1937–1945

• 

  The King's Speech

  1925–1939