City of Life and Death, may be too graphic for the fainthearted in exposing Japanese atrocities committed in China’s capital Nanjing during 1937. As in the film John Rabe (2010), the focal point of the film is the sanctuary provided by the German John Rabe (played by John Paisley) for foreigners, Chinese women and children, and wounded Chinese soldiers. But the unexpected star of the film is Kadokawa (played by Hideo Nakaizumi), a young Japanese soldier who appears dazed at first by what he sees in Nanjing, has sex for the first time with a “comfort woman” whom he considers to have married, and tries to maintain his self-respect while exercising command authority as a sergeant. Director Lu Chuan, filming in black and white with the Chinese title Nanjing! Nanjing!, seeks to portray the massacres (300,000 estimated killed), the executions of particular persons, rapes that sometimes resulted in dead female bodies being piled up on a wheelbarrow and carted away, the squalor, and much more. Nearly a docudrama of the worst human rights assault on a city in modern times, the Political Film Society has nominated City of Life and Death as the best film exposé of 2011 as well as best film on human rights and best film on war and peace. MH