Although I've heard about the Japanese invasion of China during WWII and knew about Chinese hatred for the Japanese for the many atrocities of that period (primarily via a number of Chinese friends and movies like Lust, Caution), I'd never attached faces to this horror until seeing Nanking. My ignorant naivety has been forever shaken by the stories and images shared in Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman's devastating documentary. Imagine the bloodiest Samurai movie you';ve ever seen, then remove their code of honor and multiply the body count by 1,000 and you'll have a visceral sense of the chaos and heartbreak. I now more fully understand the extreme hatred that many Chinese continue to harbor towards the Japanese.

The directors attempt to paint this as a more general illustration about the horrors of war, but the grisly accounts are so graphic that it's impossible to apply them to Vietnam, Iraq, and other wars since that period. Inspired by Iris Chang's bestselling The Rape of Nanking and constructed along the lines of Schindler's List, the filmmakers focus primarily on a handful of American and European expats who choose to remain in China's capital city of Nanking after Shanghai falls in early November 1937. These heroic expats quickly set up a 2 mile "safety zone" to provide refuge for the poor and homeless unable to evacuate before the Japanese onslaught.

While the most wrenching accounts are shared by actual survivors, the filmmakers cast professional actors to fill in for prominent expats—excerpting their diaries and letters for first hand reports of the horrors. The three expats who make up an informal triangle for the "safety zone" are German businessman John Rabe (Jurgen Prochnow) who attempts to use his Nazi Party affiliation for humanistic purposes, head of Christian missionary college Minnie Vautrin (Mariel Hemingway), and missionary George Fitch (John Getz). Had the filmmakers been forced to rely only on actors, the numerous Japanese denials that their culture would never allow the described atrocities to take place would have more credence. But when this is accompanied with first-person accounts from both survivors and perpetrators, along with pictures and video smuggled out, the evidence is irrefutable . . . and indisputable, no matter how wretched and unbelievable.

The shocking images are frequently head turners—painfully difficult to view, unless you're sadistically inclined to enjoy mutilations and graphic descriptions of young girls being raped or being cleaved in two. Despite the structure that appears designed to highlight the Herculean efforts of the 22 expats responsible for saving the lives of an estimated 250,000 Chinese, what remains indelible are the absolute tearjerker first person accounts. These are so powerful that I'm still fighting back the tears, and there's simply no way to describe these intense narratives accurately.

That is what makes Nanking the most important documentary of the year, one that I’d recommend to anyone who has the stomach for the truth. Mere statistics like the estimated 200,000 Nanking residents killed and 20,000 women from age 12-60 being raped don't begin to illustrate adequately. That comes from the overwhelming details. The story of man's inhumanity during wartime is an old one, but this film delivers the message raw unlike anything I've seen before.