Films

• Japan/2008/120min.
• Director: Sumiko Haneda

Up to mid-1940s, Imperial Japan and the Kwantung Army lured farmers from all over Japan to be settlers in north Manchuria with false promises of a “paradise” on earth. When Japan lost the war, the Army officers arranged for transportation for themselves and their families, leaving the settlers to die of starvation or suicide. In her moving documentary “A Story of Manchurian Settler Communities,” Manchuria-born director Sumiko Haneda studies the tragedy of the abandoned settlers, many of whom were forced to kill or leave their own babies behind.