T.F. Mou's Black Sun: 731 (Man Behind the Sun) is the rarest of the rare, a film that is horrifying in its portrayal of inhumanity and still manages to document a period in history rarely acknowledged in the western world.
Black Sun: 731 is an important film. It documents the atrocities committed by the Japanese Imperial Army Medical Corps against the Chinese and Russian prisoners of war taken in the Sino-Japanese war.
It's all true.
Mau's original intention was to create a documentary of the activities at Unit 731 but it is believed that no film from that time in history still remains. If any does it is locked in the deepest depths of a Japanese medical school vault, or in a military installation. Therefore Mau was obliged to bring this story to the screen in docudrama format. That is, fictional stories based around real events where the main idea of the film is the events that frame the story used to move the viewer along to a conclusion. This was popularised with, surprisingly enough, an American made-for-television movie named "Holocaust" that chronicled the Nazi extermination of European Jews during the Second World War.
Mau tells three separate yet important stories in this film. The first concerns the return to power of General Shiro Ishii, the leader of Unit 731 and inventor of the Ishii Battlefield Water Purification Pump (I am not sure the name is correct) following a charge of corruption filed by one of his staff members. The second concerns the coming-of-age of several Japanese Youth Corps members who arrive at Unit 731 at the beginning of the film. The third story follows the attempts of three prisoners to get information about the Japanese act ivies out of the camp.
The acting is uniformly excellent.
All three stories are effectively framed by the closing months of the Second World War as more and more pressure is put on the camp to develop bacteriological weapons for use against the Americans and Russians.
Again, since this film is a docudrama the stories are less important than the frame of the movie, and the frame of the movie is bacteriological (and other medical) experiments performed on prisoners of war, and in some cases, innocent civilians.
Black Sun: 731 is an important film. It documents the atrocities committed by the Japanese Imperial Army Medical Corps against the Chinese and Russian prisoners of war taken in the Sino-Japanese war.
It's all true.
Mau's original intention was to create a documentary of the activities at Unit 731 but it is believed that no film from that time in history still remains. If any does it is locked in the deepest depths of a Japanese medical school vault, or in a military installation. Therefore Mau was obliged to bring this story to the screen in docudrama format. That is, fictional stories based around real events where the main idea of the film is the events that frame the story used to move the viewer along to a conclusion. This was popularised with, surprisingly enough, an American made-for-television movie named "Holocaust" that chronicled the Nazi extermination of European Jews during the Second World War.
Mau tells three separate yet important stories in this film. The first concerns the return to power of General Shiro Ishii, the leader of Unit 731 and inventor of the Ishii Battlefield Water Purification Pump (I am not sure the name is correct) following a charge of corruption filed by one of his staff members. The second concerns the coming-of-age of several Japanese Youth Corps members who arrive at Unit 731 at the beginning of the film. The third story follows the attempts of three prisoners to get information about the Japanese act ivies out of the camp.
The acting is uniformly excellent.
All three stories are effectively framed by the closing months of the Second World War as more and more pressure is put on the camp to develop bacteriological weapons for use against the Americans and Russians.
Again, since this film is a docudrama the stories are less important than the frame of the movie, and the frame of the movie is bacteriological (and other medical) experiments performed on prisoners of war, and in some cases, innocent civilians.