A young British reporter and a brave nurse unite to safeguard orphaned children amid danger, upheaval, and human resilience during 1937 wartime China.
Set during the Japanese occupation of China, the film follows George Hogg as he encounters a devastated landscape and discovers a group of vulnerable, displaced children.
With the help of an Australian nurse and local resistance fighters, Hogg learns to navigate cultural challenges while assuming unexpected responsibility for the children's survival.
The story highlights courage, compassion, and determination as Hogg leads the children toward safety, forging deep bonds and finding purpose in a world torn apart by conflict.
The film opens in a bar in Shanghai in 1937, with two young men trying to get somewhere they should not go. One is about to be married on Tuesday. The other wants a pass to Nanjing.
"He won't be here on Tuesday. He's headed straight for hell himself in the morning."
The deal gets made, with Red Cross papers and a borrowed identity and a transit permit, and George Hogg, a British journalist who has been in China for five days, talks his way into the city where the Japanese army is about to do something the world has still not entirely absorbed.
What he sees there is the reason the rest of the film happens. Hogg was a real man. He photographed what he found in Nanjing, was caught, and came very close to being executed for it. He survived, was taken in by a Chinese Communist partisan, and ended up somewhere he had never planned to be, in charge of sixty orphaned boys at a school in Huang Shi.
The film's second half is the journey that made his name. With the war closing in, Hogg led those children on foot across the Liu Pan Shan mountains to the edge of the Gobi desert, roughly seven hundred miles, in winter, with boys as young as four. Most of them survived. He died of tetanus, from a cut on his foot, shortly before the war ended.
Roger Spottiswoode directs it as a large-scale production and it earns the scale. The landscapes are the point of the second half, and the sense of distance is what makes the achievement legible. Jonathan Rhys Meyers plays Hogg as someone who becomes brave by increments rather than by decision, which fits what is known of him. Radha Mitchell is the nurse who keeps the enterprise from collapsing, and Chow Yun-fat the partisan who saves his life and then makes use of him.
It sits in a small group of films about foreigners caught in the Second Sino-Japanese War, a conflict that began before the war in Europe and is far less familiar in Britain than it should be. The film is not subtle about wanting you to know that. Some of the boys Hogg led were still alive when it was made, and appear at the end.
Directed by Roger Spottiswoode. Two hours four minutes. Set in 1937.