Devils on the Doorstep

In a small village occupied by Japanese forces, a mysterious figure forces a peasant to hold a captured Japanese soldier and his Chinese translator hostage, throwing the community into a farcical yet increasingly dangerous predicament. The comedy curdles into tragedy as the villagers ultimately face brutal reprisal.

The film depicts the Japanese occupation of rural China near the end of the war, a period marked by uneasy coexistence between occupying garrisons and local villagers punctuated by sudden mass violence and reprisal killings.

The story and characters are fictional, used allegorically to explore Sino-Japanese wartime relations rather than to depict specific documented events.

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 Jiang Wen

Cast: Jiang Wen, Kagawa Teruyuki, Yuan Ding, Jiang Hongbo

Positioned at 1944–1945 within the Second Sino-Japanese War phase of the war, as part of the Japanese occupation of China. This is entry 109 of 150 in the chronological archive.

• Japanese occupation
• village life
• black comedy
• wartime atrocity

• 

  Lust, Caution

  1938–1942

• 

  The Flowers of War

  December 1937

• 

  City of Life and Death

  December 1937 – January 1938

• 

  The Eight Hundred

  26 October – 1 November 1937

• 

  The Children of Huang Shi

  1937–1945

• 

  John Rabe

  November 1937 – February 1938