In the 75 years since the Nanjing Massacre there have been many attempts to document and tell its tale via the creative medium of motion picture making. Some were pure propaganda, others naive and some downright trite. One stands head and shoulders above all; director Lu Chuan’s “Nanjing, Nanjing! City of Life and Death”.
Hailing from Xinjiang, filmmaker and screenwriter Lu Chuan was born in 1971 and was educated at the People’s Liberation Army International Relations University in Nanjing. After studying a masters degree in directing at the Beijing Film Academy, his first two films, “The Missing Gun” (2002) and “Kekexili: Mountain Patrol” (2004) achieved much critical acclaim both at home and abroad, despite being small-budget productions.
Lu had been nursing the idea for his third film since 2003, but upon is release in 2009 no amount of preparation would have readied him for what was about to unfold. For within the first week of the film’s release, death threats began to arrive.
The controversy was aroused by the film’s sympathetic portrayal of a Japanese soldier; Lu cast Hideo Nakaizumi as Kadokawa, a Japanese haunted by his inability to stop the slaughter ordered by his superior officers.
