BEIJING — College student Chen Lin heard the buzz about the new film depicting the horrors of Japan's World War II-era massacre of 300,000 Chinese civilians in Nanjing.
Friends told her that the images in the Chinese-distributed drama, "City of Life and Death," would be brutal -- mass rapes, point-blank executions, public beheadings and victims buried alive.
But perhaps as disturbing to many filmgoers: Director Lu Chuan portrays Japanese soldiers as real people, with human flaws, some deeply conflicted over the murder and mayhem they inflict.
"My friends said go see it," Chen said. "It tells the same painful story, but from a different point of view."
Since its April release, a public uproar has ensued, with some viewers walking out, a few questioning the theater manager's patriotism.
Distributed by the state-run China Film Group and approved by the Communist Party -- after many of its most violent scenes were excised by censors -- the film has nonetheless drawn the ire of many bloggers. Lu has even received death threats.
Accustomed to Japanese soldiers being demonized as mindless murderers, many were unprepared for a more balanced rendering of human frailty.
Called "Nanjing Nanjing" here, the black-and-white film plays like a 1930s newsreel as it details the carnage through the eyes of characters, some fictional and some based on true accounts.
Along with the terrified victims, there is an ordinary Japanese soldier so haunted by the brutality that he takes his own life.
China remains irate that Japanese politicians have neither apologized for nor admitted the scope of the killings, while Japanese historians have erased the episode from their nation's textbooks.
Many aren't buying the film characters' remorse.
"I have never met a Japanese person that has found their conscience like those in the movie," one blogger vented. "Lu Chuan, 300,000 Nanjing souls will not forgive you, you modern Chinese traitor, for covering up the Nanjing massacre for the Japanese!"
In Nanjing, home to many elderly survivors of the 1937 attack, the response has been particularly vitriolic.
Zhao Zhengang, 87, said the real Japanese soldiers showed no such mercy as that depicted in the film.
"Such handling is not only inconsistent with history, but also shows an attitude of forgiving them," she told the news media.
