Testimony of History: As Living Survivors Dwindle, Who Will Tell Nanjing's Story?

For over two decades, documentary filmmaker Cao Haibin and his team have used the camera to pierce through the dust of history, confronting memories of Nanjing long obscured by mainstream Western narratives. His latest work pays tribute to Chinese-American author Iris Chang — the courageous writer who sounded the alarm on history at the cost of her own life. Her book, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, exposed to the world a historical trauma that has long been deliberately downplayed. As the number of living survivors dwindles, Cao and his team race against time, traveling across the globe to preserve the final eyewitness accounts. They also unearth long-buried archival footage, searching for light amid humanity’s darkest hours. These visual chronicles are more than records of historical truth — they are cross-temporal dialogues between civilizations. In them, memory becomes a cornerstone of peace, and truth becomes a light to guide the future.