Keswick Film Club - City Of Life And Death

Synopsis

The story takes place in 1937, shortly after the beginning of the Sino-Japanese War. The Imperial Japanese Army has just captured the temporary capital of the Republic of China, and what follows is now known as the Nanjing Massacre. Commander Lu leads a small Chinese unit of regular and irregular combatants in defensive street-to-street fighting against a vastly superior army. This third feature by Chinese writer-director Lu Chuan (The Missing Gun and Kekexili: Mountain Patrol) presents other key individuals - a humane Japanese officer, a ‘comfort woman’, a Schindler-like figure who saved many civilians - who dramatise and give heart to the authentic story of terrible events which still cannot suppress the human instinct for survival.