The Four Hundred Million

In September 1937 the Chinese communists had joined Tchang K'ai-shek's Kwomintang to take up the battle against the Japanese aggressor. At the end of the year the Kwomintang capital, Nanking, had also fallen into Japanese hands. Han K'ou became the new capital. In this period, Joris Ivens went to China with John Ferno and Frank Capra. They filmed the battle of T'aiertshwang, the only combat that was won by the Chinese. In 1938 Han K'ou also fell and the Kwomintang was losing more and more terrain. Ivens and his crew were checked by the Kwomintang, which faced them with censors who were afraid the communists were given too prominent a role in the film. In madam Soon Yat?sen, a Chinese nationalist and socialist, Ivens recognised the best her people had to offer: dedicated to her country, militant and prudent. Due to problems with the authorities and her sister, madam Tchang K'ai-shek, she resided in Hong Kong, where Ivens filmed her. Preserved from a nitrate copy of the NFM, completed with two fragments from a nitrate copy of the Eastman House.