City of Life and Death

With his third film, acclaimed Mainland writer/director/executive producer Lu Chuan (THe Missing Gun, Mountain Patrol: Kekexili) has created a stunning epic film, shot in luminous black and white, that recounts the true story of the 1937 Japanese occupation of China’s capital Nanking and the heroic defiance of the residents. City of Life and Death tells of the utter chaos and terrible sadness of war in which the occupier and the occupied seem almost equally unmoored by forces they cannot control. Sometimes heroically, sometimes stoically, they do what they must to survive. The film depicts the Chinese soldiers, civilian men, women and children, along with courageous American and European sympathizers who bravely resisted, when it would have been so much easier to accept defeat and death.