Courtesy TV.Sohu.com (via Coming Soon) comes a trailer for Zhang Yimou’s The Flowers of War, which stars Christian Bale stars as “a Catholic priest who shelters a group of prostitutes and female students in his church during the brutal 1937 invasion and pillaging of the Chinese capitol by Japanese troops known as the ‘Rape of Nanking.’”

As a longtime fan of Zhang’s films (particularly Hero and his earlier, quieter dramas like Happy Times, Not One Less and Raise the Red Lantern), I’m definitely interested in this, although perhaps because I don’t knowing much about the historical events in question, I couldn’t make a ton of sense out of this trailer.

The film also stars Shigeo Kobayashi, presumably as a Japanese soldier, and I noticed Paul Schneider (All the Real Girls, Parks & Recreation) in the trailer, as well.

The Flowers of War will be the Chinese entry for the Best Foreign Language Film in the next Academy Awards (according to an old /Film article on the film, the film is about 60% Mandarin and 40% English), and so it will get a release before the end of the year somewhere, but possibly not a very big one.