DEAD TO RIGHTS Trailer Reveals The Damning Power Of Photographic Image

Shen Ao’s new epic wartime drama comes at perhaps one of the most harrowing times of our lives with Dead To Rights.

Actors Liu Haoran, Wang Chuanjun, Gao Ye and Wang Xiao star in the film which follows a group of civilians who work a photo development studio for the Japanese military in 1937 as a means of survival. When their work ends up producing proof of their war crimes, they risk it all to covertly smuggle the evidence out before the Japanese can cover it up.

The film is set against the backdrop of the Nanjing Massacre (just a few years before the second World War), during which a reported 300,000 civilians and unarmed soldiers were killed by the Japanese. I’m pretty sure it was one of those times where mankind stood before these atrocities and said “never again,” then came the Holocaust, and then the Nakba and the current genocide happening in Gaza, and all amid centuries of genocide against the indigenous people of North America, Gaza, etc… Seriously, if there were ever a film crucial to our times then Dead To Rights could very well be a candidate. Oof.

Dead To Rights opens nationwide in China on August 2. Catch the trailer below: