Word: changes
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...last years of her life, her mother remembers, author Iris Chang wanted to make a movie. Chang's 1997 best seller, The Rape of Nanking, had shone a spotlight on an infamous 1937 atrocity. This was the massacre of an estimated 260,000 people, and the rape of as many as 20,000 women, by Japanese troops occupying Nanjing (formerly Nanking), then the Chinese capital. The book spent 10 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list and made the 29-year-old a literary star. But Chang wanted to do more. "She firmly believed that a movie...
...That wish is now coming true in spades. No fewer than six movies about the massacre-including one about Chang herself-are in the works. The first, a documentary called Nanking, premiered at Sundance in January and will be screened at the Hong Kong International Film Festival in late March. It tells the story of a handful of American and European expatriates who established a neutral safety zone to protect some 200,000 Nanjing residents during the conflict. The film is the brainchild of Ted Leonsis, vice chairman of AOL (which, like TIME, is owned by Time Warner...
...does accept responsibility for the war and does feel Japan should do more to atone." Furthermore, "there's a huge community in Japan that's trying to stop the government from rewriting history," says director Nancy Tong, whose 1992 Nanjing documentary In the Name of the Emperor helped inspire Chang's book. Indeed, Japanese activists helped track down the former soldiers interviewed in Tong's movie and in Nanking, and provided some of the latter film's most disturbing footage: former members of the imperial army's Yamada Unit candidly discussing their detachment's execution of some 20,000 Chinese...
...Over the next few months, the revisionist view will come under even more cinematic fire. The rights to Chang's book have been acquired by producer Gerald Green and director Simon West (Lara Croft: Tomb Raider), who will soon start filming a $38 million project. California-based writer and producer Kevin Kent is negotiating with Oliver Stone to direct a film based on his own novel, Nanking. Stanley Tong, the Hong Kong director of several Jackie Chan movies, has a Nanjing movie in development, and award-winning Chinese director Lu Chuan hopes to start shooting his own account...
...Mizushima's film may have one benefit, sparking enough controversy to get more people talking about the burdens of the past. Spahic, director of the documentary about Chang, expects all this cinematic interest to help "open a dialogue" on Nanjing's legacy. There are even signs that reconciliation might not be out of the question. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has taken pains to mend fences with China in his first months in office, and Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao is scheduled to visit Japan in April. As Kingston says, both sides are coming to the realization that "this relationship...