Canadian film marks 70th anniversary of Nanking massacre

By Angela Lee

Olivia Cheng understands obsession.

It’s what drove the actress to campaign for the title role in a new documentary drama about Chinese American author Iris Chang’s life and 2004 suicide on a lonely rural road near San Francisco Bay.

Obsession is also what spurred Chang on to write The Rape of Nanking: the Forgotten Holocaust of World War II. Chang’s book was the first detailed English account of the massacre of up to 300,000 Chinese at the hands of Japanese forces in 1937, during the Second Sino-Japanese War. It would hit the New York Times best-sellers list as soon as it came out, and change a lot of lives – most notably, the author’s own.

“If there was ever a dream role for me to play, it would be Iris Chang,” says Edmonton-born Cheng, who recently starred in the Emmy-winning miniseries Broken Trail, with Robert Duvall.

Three years ago, Cheng picked up a copy of the epochal book while researching potential screenwriting projects. Blown away by the story and deeply curious about its young, Chinese American author, Cheng set out to track her down.

That’s when she learned of the author’s death.

“I went from being so appreciative and fascinated by this hero figure to being overcome by the idea that I would never get to meet her,” says Cheng, a former news reporter for Global TV and the Edmonton Journal, who now resides in Vancouver.

“Just who was this woman who had put so much into her work and then killed herself?”

Obsessed with learning everything she could about Iris Chang, Cheng placed a call to the author’s widower, Bretton Douglas.

Douglas, who is raising the couple’s five-year-old son, Christopher, told Cheng the same thing he’d told every filmmaker who approached him for his late wife’s story – to go through her things at the institute where she worked, talk to the people she’d interviewed, then get back to him if still interested.

It’s exactly what Cheng did, and returned to Douglas keener than ever to follow the story through.

Over lunch, Douglas filled the actress in on his wife’s private persona.

“Iris was brave,” says Cheng, of what she learned. “She was someone who acted in spite of fear and in spite of doubt. She was vulnerable and scared and consumed with doubts and [plagued by] dreams, but she charged on until she broke through.”

When word got out that Toronto-based Reel-to-Reel Productions was casting Iris Chang: the Rape of Nanking, Cheng knew she had to have the part.

“We got a call from Olivia, who tells us, ‘Stop looking; I’m her. I’m your Iris Chang,’” recounts Iris Chang producer and co-director Anne Pick, a founding board member of the acclaimed Hot Docs Festival. “Her email gave us goosebumps; she had such a close connection with Iris.”

The production, filmed in Nanjing, Japan and Canada, gives a sense of Chang’s travels as she goes to China and comes face-to-face with the emotional impact the massacre had on its survivors.

It’s not the only film on the subject in production, this year being the 70th anniversary of the massacre and the 10th anniversary of the publication of Iris Chang’s book. Earlier this year, Woody Harrelson starred in AOL’s Nanking, about a group of foreigners who had stayed in China during the invasion and helped save hundreds of thousands of lives. There are projects about the massacre planned for China, France, and Hollywood. One Japanese filmmaker is even planning a movie refuting the claims made by Chang’s book.

Though Iris Chang’s suicide has left many questions unanswered – why, for instance, she had in her last days felt her life was in danger – Olivia Cheng doesn’t want the questions to eclipse what the author has accomplished.

“I want people to be touched by Iris in the same way I was, and be able to use her as an inspiration to do whatever it is they need to do,” says Cheng. “We have to stand up and say we won’t let this happen again.”

Iris Chang: the Rape of Nanking, is playing at the Ridge Theatre in Vancouver Nov 15, 17, 22 and 25 in cooperation with Vancouver ALPHA. For more info, visit www.irischangthemovie.com.