Twenty Two

The documentary follows the present-day lives of elderly women who were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese army during the Second World War. The phrase comfort women used for them is a euphemism; what happened was abduction, confinement and systematic rape. The title comes from the twenty-two women still living in mainland China in 2014, when it was shot; the earlier film Guo Ke made in 2012 was called Thirty Two, after the thirty-two alive at that point. By the time this film was released in 2017, only eight of those recorded were still living. The director takes a quiet and unhurried path, leaving room for what the women do not say. It was made through crowdfunding with more than thirty-two thousand contributions. Around two hundred thousand women from China, Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines and elsewhere were subjected to the same system.