The 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. 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 in the city 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. (Source:L China.org.cn, Nov 20 2007).