China Directors Rush To Make Japan Atrocity Films

No fewer than four Chinese films about the Nanjing massacre are planned for this year.

No fewer than four Chinese films about the Nanjing massacre are planned for this year, the 70th anniversary of Japan's capture of China's former capital, Xinhua news agency reported.

The latest film, "Nanjing! Nanjing!", had been approved by China's censors and would start shooting in April, Xinhua said, the same month that Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao embarks upon an ice-breaking visit to Japan.

"We've spent two years collecting historical documents about the massacre," Xinhua quoted the film's director, Lu Chuan, as saying.

"I will try to make history clear and explain it in the movie, rather than expose the sorrow between nations," Lu said.

The 200 million yuan ($26 million) film would feature a scene in which 40,000 people were killed, Xinhua said, and recreate 1930s Nanjing in China's frigid northeastern province of Jilin.

China says invading Japanese troops slaughtered 300,000 men, women and children in Nanjing, then known as Nanking. An Allied tribunal after World War Two put the death toll at about 142,000.

Post-war ties between China and Japan have been overshadowed by what Beijing says has been Tokyo's refusal to admit to atrocities committed by Japanese soldiers in the country between 1931 and 1945.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, under fire for denying government involvement in forcing women to serve as wartime sex slaves, said on Monday he was "apologising here and now as the prime minister".

In January, China condemned plans by a Japanese group backed by ultra-nationalist figures to make "The Truth about Nanjing", a documentary denying Japanese atrocities.