Nanjing! Nanjing!

I've been really impressed by this film. The way it makes a contrast between the fragility of the Chinese position and the vast and enormous military resources at the hands of the Japanese to simply dispose of the Chinese population just the way they want, remorseless and unlimited in their decisions, creates in the spectator a sense of utter despair and impotence, as the starting violence and euphoria transforms into raw and premeditated brutality. But this same perspective makes you appreciate more intensely the triumph of the defeated's mentality over the conquerors' one, the silent resistance that becomes an unified wall against the oppression and ruthless rule of the Japanese military, whom at the end began to fall apart morally. The action is awesomely captured, photography is great, and direction is remarkable, some scenes hit you really hard, but not to the extent to consider it a sadist or heavy-to-watch film. Henceforth, one of my favorites war movies of all time.

I finished watching this film two hours ago and the punch in the stomach I received watching it still hurts. I don't recall having received such a punch in my 60 or so years of film watching. Unlike films such as "Schindler's List" or "Empire of the Sun", this film does not take sides. It's like a candid camera operated by an invisible grand master hidden in the crowd or the rubble. It's just there recording events. As a result, despite the fact that it focuses on the big picture, the individual is not lost: Both the Chinese and the Japanese, each and every one of them, in huge crowds are real believable characters. This gives the viewer a grand and horrible sense of presence which is what makes it so painful. It would take courage to watch it again.

I'm an overseas Chinese, growing up listening to my grandfather telling the stories about how bad the Japanese Military treating the Chinese people in WWII.

I saw some of the movies made back in the 80's/90's about the rape of Nanking, to me they are exploitation movies and never affected me or leave me with profound experience. I'm actually disgusted with them making such low movies. Also most of the documentaries I watched never really does anything.

I watched Nanjing! Nanjing! - City of Life and Death tonight and it really drained me emotionally, the movie really depicting the real face/real ugly side of war, where the victims are always the people, doesn't matter what wars or which countries.

The movie itself doesn't really do the finger pointing like other movies, but it just showing, in my opinion, the fair view on what was going on back then without taking sides.

And it's show one thing, the most profound thing to me, that The Chinese people can endure a lot of hardship that life throw at them and that's possibly why their cultures and civilization last for a long time.

Highly recommended for people who never really know this part of history, as Chinese I know about it, but for lot of my westerners friends who never been to China, they only heard about it but didn't realize how crazy it was and how significant is this event for the Chinese people. Most people know the atrocities the Nazis did in WWII, but not the Japanese Atrocities.

Watched it and let's pray there won't be WW III or any wars at all actually.

CITY OF LIFE AND DEATH is a masterpiece - of film making, of finding the midline of response to war from both sides, of cautiously but successfully blending intimate stories with the gory atrocities of war, and of recreating a period of history we too soon forget unless prodded by works such as this. Lu Chuan both wrote and directed this vision of the 1937 decimation of Nanking, the capital of China, by the Japanese that lasted in action for only six weeks but that has been a permanent festering wound on the history of mankind that will always be a reminder to what War is about.

Subtitled NANKING! NANKING! the audience is led to expect a film honoring the Chinese who bravely fought to resist of the Japanese invasion and ultimate destruction of the then capital of China. Instead the writer/director elects to put us in the midst of the war, showing all aspects of how war changes and affects and destroys people. The black and white film is able to create the illusion that we are actually in 1937 Nanking. We meet several important personalities from that time: the Chinese Resistance leader Lu Jianxiong (the inordinately gifted and handsome actor Ye Liu), the Chinese schoolteacher Miss Jiang (Yuanyuan Gao) who fights constantly to save her people, the Nazi German John Rabe (John Paisley) who maintains a Safety Zone to protect the Chinese until the Nazis recall him to avoid insulting their Japanese allies, Rabe's Chinese assistant and translator Mr Tang (Wei Fan) and his wife (Lan Qin) who despite the suffering they endure from the Japanese still are selfless in the choices they make to help their people, and Kadokawa (and impressive Hideo Nakaizumi) who as a Japanese soldier is a symbol for those warriors who are conflicted about the cruelty inflicted on the Chinese. These individuals provide stories with the story that allow the viewer to connect to the human aspect of the victims and the perpetrators of the annihilation we are witnessing. There are devastating scenes of the forced 'comfort houses' created to keep the Japanese soldiers happy, the demanded selection of 100 Chinese women to provide physical gratification to the enemy, the massacre of thousands of citizens - men, women, children - and the destruction of the very city itself. But Lu Chuan balances these with some very tender moments, such as the first sexual encounter of a virgin soldier with a prostitute and how he interprets this experience as love to the point of providing as much gratitude and safety to the prostitute as he can, and the incredibly tender scenes between Lu Jianxiong and a little boy who brings him bullets.

The cast is stunning and while many of us do not recognize the faces, they are obviously some of the cream of the crop of Chinese and Japanese actors. Yu Cao is in charge of the very realistic and photographically perfect cinematography and the musical score by Tony Liu is not only appropriate for the theme of the film but also provides some very simple Western piano music for the intimate scenes. There are multiple choices of subtitles including English. CITY OF LIFE AND DEATH not only documents a piece of martial history that is important to remember, but it is also another way of viewing how WAR can alter the minds and lives of those on both side of the battle. Highly Recommended.

Grady Harp

The city is Nanjing, then capital of China. The time is 1937-38 when Japanese forces occupied the place. The story is the horrific consequence of that occupation for Chinese soldiers and civilians alike. The film is dedicated to the 300,000 victims of the atrocity, a figure that is still debated. The executions, the hangings, the beheadings, the burning, the bayoneting, the burying alive, the rapes - all of which happened - are all shown, but not overly dwelt upon. Instead young Lu Chuan, who both wrote and directed, tells a human story, focusing on a limited number of individuals, not all Chinese. This 2009 work was originally shot on colour film and then desaturated into black and white and the cinematography by Yu Cau is very impressive.

We are offered politically correct depictions of the bravery of the Chinese soldiers and the nobility of Chinese civilians, especially the women, but the focus on the international safety zone brings to the fore the role of John Rabe, often called the German Schindler, and other nationals. Surprisingly, however, Lu gives an important role to a (fictional) young Japanese officer called Kadokawa who is shown as compassionate and horrified by what his fellow soldiers are doing - a characterisation that understandably proved controversial in China.

When I was in Japan, where they talk of the 'Nanjing Incident', at the Memorial Museum in Hiroshima of all places I found that the Japanese are still downplaying the scale of this slaughter. When I was in China, where they call it the 'Nanjing Massacre', not least during my time in Nanjing itself the history was still live and feelings remain raw. I wish that this film could have been seen as much in Japan - which has still not faced up to its wartime crimes in the way that Germany has done - as in China and indeed Europeans and Americans should know more, as they would by viewing the film, about the rape of Nanjing.