Iris Chang Film said to be Released by Year End
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For those of you not in-the-know, a documentary film is being produced on the life of Iris Chang, author of “the Rape of Nanking”. She led a tumultuous life as a result of her celebrity from the book, and it culminated in her suicide in November of 2004. The book was the first English-language book to bring attention to the Japanease atrocities in China. Apart from the widespread criticism and praise it generated, it sparked a new political dialogue on the matter where once there was none.
Iris Chang film said to be released at year’s end
2/4/2007 10:11
http://english.eastday.com/eastday/englishedition/
features/userobject1ai2729596.htmlThe 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 Jiangsu Province, that “Iris Chang” had finished shooting in China and would continue in Japan, the United States, 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 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 last year.
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