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The Flowers of War, directed by Zhang Yimou and starring Christian Bale, focuses on the Nanjing Massacre, which took place in China in 1937. The actor plays the role of an undertaker who pretends to be an American missionary to defend some girls and women Chinese from the atrocities of Japanese soldiers.
The film, which was originally to be titled The Heroes of Nanking, is based on the book by Chinese writer Geling Yan, entitled The 13 Women of Nanking. The screenplay was entrusted to Liu Heng who previously collaborated with the director on the screenplay for the 1990 film Ju Dou.
On the choice of Christian Bale as the protagonist for his film, the director said: "I met Christian in America and I was impressed by his seriousness and the commitment with which he began to do research to fully understand his character.
his presence will help me on the western market, however this engagement was not studied at the table, but is the result of chance." The film was made and produced in China, had a cost of 90.2 million dollars as a budget and ranks among the most expensive films in the history of Chinese cinema along with the productions of John Woo.
The film includes both Chinese and English dialogue parts. Director of photography Xiaoding Zhao previously worked with ZhÄng Yìmóu on The Forest of Flying Daggers. Special effects supervisor Joss Williams, on the other hand, counts Alien 3, The Bourne Ultimatum and Sweeney Todd, both of 2007.
Production designer YÅhei Taneda designed the first chapter of Kill Bill. Here the theatrical trailer
About Nanjing Massacre
The Nanjing Massacre, a set of war crimes perpetrated by the Japanese army in Nanjing, at the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War, is a tragic event that has had and still has a worldwide media coverage.
The city, at that time the capital of the Republic of China, fell into the hands of the Japanese Imperial Army on December 13, 1937, and for about six weeks, between December 1937 and January 1938, Japanese soldiers killed about 300,000 people.
Japanese troops committed numerous atrocities, such as rape, looting, fires and the killing of prisoners of war and civilians. Although the killings began with the justification of eliminating Chinese soldiers disguised as civilians, large numbers of innocent people are believed to have been intentionally identified as enemy combatants and executed as the slaughter began to take shape.
Among the confirmed victims, tens of thousands were innocent children, killed for fun, and rapes of women and murders quickly became the norm. The massacre of 1937 and the way it is told in school texts continues to be the subject of controversy in the context of relations between China and Japan.