Nanking.

"The Japanese army's authorized mass rape, pillage, and murder of the Chinese has until recently (thanks also to Iris Chang's The Rape of Nanking) remained one of the Second World War's forgotten stories, and Nanking brings the facts to harrowing life," writes Michael Joshua Rowin in Reverse Shot. "Nanking may center on courageous people like John Rabe and Minnie Vautrin, both of whom harbored and saved the lives of hundreds of civilians (and were rewarded with postwar poverty and suicide), but it's the Chinese massacre victims who emerge with, and as, its real story."

"While the footage and survivors of Nanking are gray and decaying, its unbearable story is not something out of the past; the evil and ignorance it describes are alive and thriving today," writes Michelle Orange in the Voice.

Updated through 12/17.

In the New York Times, Dave Itzkoff profiles Ted Leonis, "the gregarious and sometimes polarizing Web entrepreneur and sports-franchise mogul who, early this year, traded away his day-to-day responsibilities as vice chairman of AOL to devote more time to the decidedly less lucrative field of documentary filmmaking."

Filmmaker's Scott Macaulay points to a couple of pieces by Leonis that address the concept of "filmanthropy." It was Chang's suicide in 2005, at the age of 36, that inspired Leonis to fund Nanking, Michelle Orange reminds us.

And indieWIRE interviews Leonis.

Earlier: Reviews from Sundance.

Updates, 12/12: "Nanking suggests that in a world grown jaded by images of violence, written testimony read aloud still carries a weight that the most horrifying images cannot exert," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "Shown sparingly in the film, the pictures of the dead and seriously injured may sear your mind, but the act of recalling the unspeakable and giving it voice creates a deeper reality."

"Not many who see this film will ever forget the emotion with which an old man describes how he was forced to watch as a Japanese soldier bayoneted his mother and his baby brother, still at the breast, when he was a small child," writes James Bowman in the New York Sun. "Yet on standing back a bit from it, you've got to ask yourself just what the filmmakers thought they were doing here by putting so much raw feeling on the screen. At the end, they say the film was made not out of hatred for the Japanese but as a reminder of 'how horrible war is.' That seems to me a cop-out. It treats 'war' as a force of nature and not as a product of human choices that can be both right and wrong."

Update, 12/15: The Atlantic runs David M Kennedy's review of Iris Chang's The Rape of Nanking: "In the final accounting, this book does a much better job of describing the horrors of Nanjing than of explaining them."

Update, 12/17: For the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (and in German), Frank Hollmann reports from the set of John Rabe: A True Story, a German-American co-production directed by Florian Gallenberger and featuring a cast that includes Ulrich Tukur, Daniel Brühl and Steve Buscemi.

Posted by dwhudson at December 11, 2007 3:59 PM