The makers of a docudrama on Iris Chang, the Chinese American
author of the New York Times bestseller The Rape of
Nanking, say the film will be ready for release at the end of
the year.
The producers told a press conference in Nanjing, formerly known
as "Nanking", capital of east China's Jiangsu Province, that "Iris Chang" had
finished shooting in China and would continue in Japan, the US, and
Canada.
Its screening is scheduled to coincide with the 70th anniversary
of the Nanjing Massacre.
The massacre occurred in December 1937 when Japanese troops
occupied Nanjing, then capital of China. More than 300,000 Chinese
were killed, one third of the city's buildings in the city were
burned and more than 20,000 women were raped in eight weeks.
Worried that the West was forgetting the atrocity, Iris Chang
compiled recollections from sources in China, Japan and North
America and recorded them in her book, The Rape of Nanking: The
Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, which became the first,
full-length English-language narrative of the event to reach a wide
audience.
Chang committed suicide at the age of 36 in 2004, after a battle
with depression.
"Without Chang's outcry, the western world would not hear the
victims in the massacre. Her passion shocked me, and shocked the
world. I will try my best to play the lead role in the film," said
Olivia Cheng, a Chinese Canadian actress who played Chang.
According to Bill Spahic, director of the film, the story is
told from Chang's perspective, with no third-person narrative, to
give a more striking impression of her personality.
The film is fully funded by Canadian independent production firm
Reel Iris Productions, a partnership of Real to Reel Productions
and the Canada Association for Learning and Preserving the History
of World War II in Asia (ALPHA). Filming began in Nanjing in
December 2006.
(Xinhua News Agency April 1, 2007)