The Children of Huang Shi

In 1937, as Japanese forces advance through China, a young British journalist named George Hogg arrives in the country and becomes involved in the care of a group of orphaned boys. With the help of an Australian nurse, Lee Pearson, and a resistance fighter, Chen Hansheng, he sets out to lead the children away from the occupied city of Nanjing and across more than a thousand kilometres of mountains and desert to reach safety. The journey, inspired by real events, tests the group's endurance and reshapes Hogg's sense of duty and courage.

Roger Spottiswoode directed the film, the eleventh of the fourteen features listed in his directing career, following Ice Bound (2003) and preceding Midnight Sun (2014). Jonathan Rhys Meyers plays Hogg, with Radha Mitchell as Pearson, Chow Yun-fat as Chen Hansheng and Michelle Yeoh as Mrs. Wang. The screenplay was written by Simon van der Borgh, Jane Hawksley and James MacManus, and the production was an international effort involving Germany, Australia, Belgium, China and the United States.

The film had a budget of 40 million USD and took about 8 million USD worldwide, a wide gap between its cost and its returns. On IMDb it holds a critics' rating of 4.7/10 from 78 reviews, while on TMDB its audience rating is 6.7/10 from 175 votes, so viewers have generally received it more favourably than reviewers.