Traveling in the Caribbean in February 2005, Ted Leonsis, Vice Chairman of the America Online Inc., picked up an old newspaper and saw an obituary for Iris Chang, the prominent Chinese American author who wrote the bestseller The Rape of Nanking. As he read on, Leonsis was shocked that like most Westerners he was ignorant of the topic of her book, which described an eight-week period between 1937 and 1938 when marauding Japanese soldiers who occupied Nanjing (formerly known as Nanking), then Chinese capital, butchered some 300,000 Chinese, raped tens of thousands of women and burned much of the city in an orgy of inhumanity.

Although Leonsis had never made a film before he felt the story needed to be told on the screen. Having spent over $2 million producing and promoting the movie, Leonsis seems to be quite satisfied with what has been achieved.

The 89-minute movie, Nanking, chronicles the slaughter from the perspective of a dozen Westerners, who risked their lives and used their influence to create a safety zone, which saved up to 200,000 lives. Leonsis feels that the Oscar-winning directors Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman had achieved a good balance between depicting the heroism of these courageous Westerners and the cruelty of war itself. Blending interviews with Chinese survivors, archival footage and the testimonies of Japanese soldiers with filmed narrations of the Westerners' letters and diaries, the well-rounded documentary won the editing award at the Sundance Film Festival in January and the Grand Prize for the Humanitarian Awards for Documentaries at the Hong Kong International Film Festival in April. Leonsis was touched that moviegoers from different countries were equally touched by the tragic scenes in the movie.

Chang Zhiqiang, just 9 years old in 1937, lost his whole family, including his parents, four brothers and a sister, to the Nanjing massacre. In the documentary, he relives memories of seeing his mother and brothers slain by Japanese soldiers in front of him. When Japanese soldiers stormed into Chang's home, Chang's mother was holding one of her baby sons in her arms. She was stabbed by a Japanese soldier and fell to the ground but managed to save the baby from falling to the ground, Chang recalled. When Chang's baby brother began to cry the Japanese soldier used his bayonet to stab the baby before throwing him into the yard. Unable to speak, Chang's mother signaled for him to fetch the baby back into the house where she breast-fed him for the last time as they both died.

Another Chinese survivor Zhang Xiuhong, who was 12 in 1937, was raped by three Japanese soldiers during the massacre. The helpless young girl had to persuade her grandfather to give up fighting the soldiers, knowing that he could easily be killed.

Li Yufei, a client manager at a Beijing-based insurance company, could not help sobbing at the film's premier in Beijing on July 3. "Hearing the story of a mother losing her child and a child losing his mother gives me unbearable sorrow," she said. Li said she has watched several movies and TV series on the Nanjing massacre made by the Chinese, but none had made her feel so real about the historical catastrophe.