Director: Lu Chuan

Cast: Ye Liu (Lu Jianxiong), Yuanyuan Gao (Miss Jiang), Hideo Nakaizumi (Kadokawa), Wei Fan (Mr Tang), Ryu Kohata (Ida), Bin Liu (Xiaodouzi), John Paisley (John Rabe).

132 minutes.

Certificate ’15’.

Screening from 16 April in London and the rest of UK.

DVD release 20 September.

The city in the title refers to Nanking (also known as Nanjing), capital city of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist China, which the Japanese captured in December 1937 during the Second Sino-Japanese war. For the next seven weeks, the Japanese embarked on a systematic orgy of murder, rape and torture of Chinese soldiers, prisoners of war and civilians, resulting in a death toll of 300,000.

Lu Chuan’s film opens with a dedication to the victims and focuses on this infamous period through the experiences of an idealistic Japanese soldier, Kadokawa, a charismatic Chinese commander, Lu Jianxiong, John Rabe, a German businessman and Nazi supporter in charge of the Safety Zone, Mr Tang, Rabe’s self-effacing secretary and Miss Jiang, the steely-eyed school teacher. Both she and Mr Tang are to show incredible courage in the face of impossible odds.

The final battle is decisive when the Japanese annihilate the remaining Chinese troops - who thought they would be spared if they surrendered - and most of a motley bunch of snipers led by Lu Jianxiong, whose runner is the ten-year old Xiaodouzi. Hand-held cameras follow as grenades are lobbed, gunfire exchanged, ruined buildings explode in clouds of dust and blood spurt from chests, giving the film an immediacy and a documentary feel which is enhanced by being shot in black & white.

Nothing he has experienced in the battlefield so far prepares Kadokawa for the ignominy of Nanking. When he and a small band of soldiers encounter a mass of Chinese seeking refuge in a church, it is difficult to know which side feels more shocked. Terrified, the Chinese exhale a collective scream. Unnerved by this, the soldiers fire at the unarmed civilians. As women and children crumple to the floor amid screams of grief, the mortified Kadokawa cries repeatedly, “I didn’t mean to!”

Walking through the body-strewn streets, Kadokawa sees yet more bodies tied to posts or strung up, a naked woman with her head twisted at an unnatural angle and several decapitated heads hanging from a branch like grotesque Christmas baubles.

With frightening efficiency, men are separated from the women and taken to different parts of the city to be disposed of by being buried alive, locked inside warehouses and incinerated, forced by bullets to walk into the sea to drown, repeatedly bayoneted and, simply, shot.

The Safety Zone, which shelters several hundreds of Chinese - mostly women and children, the sick and the injured - is tolerated by Officer Ida on account of Japan and Germany being allies. But Ida is barely able to disguise his contempt for Rabe’s Chinese assistants, Mr Tang and Miss Jiang. When indulging in simple sport and imported Japanese prostitutes no longer satisfy, the soldiers breach the Zone and rape several women. Within days, an order is issued to the stunned inhabitants: “The Imperial Army is here to borrow a few women. Just for a few days.” In return, the Zone will receive clothes, food and medical supplies. Lack of cooperation will mean the destruction of the Zone.In one of the most traumatically moving scenes in the film, the gathered women listen as a tearful Rabe inform them that a hundred women are required by the Japanese to “give comfort to the soldiers.” One by one, the women raise their hands and step forward. They are herded like animals to the Japanese enclave as rules are read out to the troops: “Senior soldiers have priority. Pay first before getting a condom to prevent venereal disease. Five dollars for Japanese women. Two dollars for Korean or Chinese. Each person shall have fifteen minutes.”

In another gripping scene, the Japanese celebrate their victory in a ritualistic dance accompanied by a giant taiko drum. The ensuing performance is at once magnificent - for its militaristic elegance - and obscene - for its trumpeting of human suffering.

The triumph of this compelling film is that with so many atrocities to choose from, Lu does not sensationalise them even though it is impossible not to show them. He does not take the simplistic route of portraying the Japanese as no more than barbarians hacking, literally, at his hapless Chinese victim, tempting as it is. There is humanity and hope, even in this hell-hole.

As Mr Tang is led to his execution, he informs Ida defiantly that his wife - released along with Rabe - is pregnant; Ida turns away as the shots are fired, blinks and sniffs. Miss Jiang, who is neither wife nor mother, risks her life and saves the boy soldier and his comrade from certain death by pretending to be related to them. Kadokawa, hard-wired to the unquestioning Japanese war machine and bewildered to within an inch of his sanity, tries to do the right thing. When he shoots Miss Jiang at her request as she is being dragged away, when he sets free - against orders - two Chinese prisoners, and when he puts a bullet into his head, Kadokawa demonstrates the humanity that is within us all, just as evil is.

I first saw this at the London Film Festival in 2009 in a full auditorium. The thundering silences that form much of the soundtrack of the film were relieved by the squelching sounds of knife plunging into flesh, the strangled cries of women, men and children, the rhythmic creaks of wooden beds during the rapes and the suppressed sobs of the audience.

Wah-Yin Rixon