Nanking
This US documentary chronicles the 1937 assault on Nanking and massacre of Chinese civilians by Japanese soldiers. It's one of the most important films of the year. But few will see it thanks to a limited release, little promotion and a restricted rating due to blood-curdling archival footage of atrocities. Oscar-winning director Bill Guttentag and co-director Dan Sturman describe how a number of Europeans saved the lives of ordinary Chinese - including through Nazi connections - as Japanese soldiers ran amok. The Europeans are played by actors such as Jurgen Prochnow, Stephen Dorff, Woody Harrelson and Mariel Hemingway, while other interviews are of actual witnesses to the carnage, including victims of unspeakable violence. Prompted by the bestselling 1997 historical study by Iris Chang (張純如), who committed suicide in late 2004, Nanking has been shortlisted for the Best Documentary Oscar, no doubt to the dismay of the Japanese government.
Chaos
This flick's distributor seems to have looked through the filmography of lead actor Jason Statham (familiar to Taiwanese audiences because of The Transporter with Shu Qi (舒淇) and Rogue Assassin with Jet Li (李連杰) for something to release - and came up with this 2005 heist drama. Statham is a disgraced police negotiator called in to deal with a hostage situation at a bank robbed by a gang led by Wesley Snipes. The gang escapes, but ... all is not what it seems. This went straight to DVD in the US, perhaps unfairly.
A jumbo operation is moving 20 elephants across the breadth of India to the mammoth private zoo set up by the son of Asia’s richest man, adjoining a sprawling oil refinery. The elephants have been “freed from the exploitative logging industry,” according to the Vantara Animal Rescue Centre, run by Anant Ambani, son of the billionaire head of Reliance Industries Mukesh Ambani, a close ally of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The sheer scale of the self-declared “world’s biggest wild animal rescue center” has raised eyebrows — including more than 50 bears, 160 tigers, 200 lions, 250 leopards and 900 crocodiles, according to
They were four years old, 15 or only seven months when they were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald and Ravensbruck. Some were born there. Somehow they survived, began their lives again and had children, grandchildren and even great grandchildren themselves. Now in the evening of their lives, some 40 survivors of the Nazi camps tell their story as the world marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the most notorious of the death camps. In 15 countries, from Israel to Poland, Russia to Argentina, Canada to South Africa, they spoke of victory over absolute evil. Some spoke publicly for the first
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