If there’s one highly acclaimed movie about the Second World War, it has to be The Flowers of War. Inspired by a novel based on a personal account of the wartime events, the film delves on the experiences of women when China was invaded by the Japanese and how the Nanking massacre occurred.
Directed by Zhang Yimou, the movie featured English actor Christian Bale on the lead role playing the character of a mortician named John Miller who found refuge in a group of women including school girls and prostitues and helped them escape from the Japanese soldiers. Filming took place right in Nanjing, China and lasted for six months.

Geling Yan, the author of the novel that inspired the film, is a Chinese-American who happened to read a personal account of the war by an American missionary named Minnie Vautrin. The missionary was managing a college in Nanjing at that time. Yan, for her part, said she was so inspired by the account prompting her to write a novel based on the perspective of a 13-year-old girl. [Read more…]