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In the last years of her life, her mother remembers, author Iris Chang wanted to make a movie. Chang's 1997 best seller, The Rape of Nanking, had shone a spotlight on an infamous 1937 atrocity. This was the massacre of an estimated 260,000 people, and the rape of as many as 20,000 women, by Japanese troops occupying Nanjing (formerly Nanking), then the Chinese capital. The book spent 10 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list and made the 29-year-old a literary star. But Chang wanted to do more. "She firmly believed that a movie or a documentary film would get her message out more than the book," says Ying-Ying Chang. Sadly, her daughter never got the chance. Iris Chang committed suicide in 2004, at the age of 36. "We were interviewed at the time and asked, 'What was Iris' last wish?'" recalls her mother. "And we said, 'To have a movie made out of her book.'"

That wish is now coming true in spades. No fewer than six movies about the massacre—including one about Chang herself—are in the works. The first, a documentary called Nanking, premiered at Sundance in January and will be screened at the Hong Kong International Film Festival in late March. It tells the story of a handful of American and European expatriates who established a neutral safety zone to protect some 200,000 Nanjing residents during the conflict. The film is the brainchild of Ted Leonsis, vice chairman of AOL (which, like TIME, is owned by Time Warner), who had chanced upon Chang's obituary in a yellowing newspaper while on holiday in the Caribbean. "It shocked me, one, that I didn't know anything about this incident and, two, that there were these remarkable people whose stories had really never been told," he recalls.

Leonsis financed the project himself and convinced Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman, who made 2003's Oscar-winning 9/11 documentary Twin Towers, to direct. The movie comprises archive footage, interviews with survivors and eyewitnesses, and readings from the letters and diaries of some of the Westerners in Nanjing, performed by such Hollywood stars as Woody Harrelson and Mariel Hemingway. One benefit of this emphasis on primary sources, says Guttentag, is that it helped distance Nanking from the bitter controversy that has sprung up over different interpretations of the massacre. "This is not a film where we had historians commenting on the incident," he says. "That's someone else's film."

Regardless, Nanking is bound to cause deeply uneasy feelings in Japan, where many members of the extreme right either deny that the massacre occurred, or claim that the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal greatly exaggerated the death toll when it concluded that Japanese troops killed about 260,000 Chinese soldiers and civilians in Nanjing between 1937 and 1938. (Some also argue that photos of the atrocities were faked, including the beheading shown at left). At a news conference on Jan. 24, filmmaker Satoru Mizushima—who also runs a Japanese satellite-TV station—lashed out at Nanking, calling it "a setup by China" based on an "erroneous understanding of history." Flanked by politicians and journalists, he announced that he'd produce his own film, provisionally entitled The Truth about Nanking, to refute it. "There was a war, and thousands of Japanese soldiers and guerillas died. But an organized rape and massacre of civilians did not happen," Mizushima insisted to TIME. The subject also receives more than its share of official whitewash. In 2005, Japan's Ministry of Education sparked outrage in China by approving a high school textbook that referred to the massacre merely as an "incident."

This isn't to say that Japanese views on the massacre are monolithic. The right-wingers "aren't really reflective of public opinion," says Jeff Kingston, a professor of Japanese history at Temple University's Tokyo campus. "Public opinion does accept responsibility for the war and does feel Japan should do more to atone." Furthermore, "there's a huge community in Japan that's trying to stop the government from rewriting history," says director Nancy Tong, whose 1992 Nanjing documentary In the Name of the Emperor helped inspire Chang's book. Indeed, Japanese activists helped track down the former soldiers interviewed in Tong's movie and in Nanking, and provided some of the latter film's most disturbing footage: former members of the imperial army's Yamada Unit candidly discussing their detachment's execution of some 20,000 Chinese prisoners in Nanjing.

Over the next few months, the revisionist view will come under even more cinematic fire. The rights to Chang's book have been acquired by producer Gerald Green and director Simon West (Lara Croft: Tomb Raider), who will soon start filming a $38 million project. California-based writer and producer Kevin Kent is negotiating with Oliver Stone to direct a film based on his own novel, Nanking. Stanley Tong, the Hong Kong director of several Jackie Chan movies, has a Nanjing movie in development, and award-winning Chinese director Lu Chuan hopes to start shooting his own account of the massacre this month. Finally, Canadian filmmaker Bill Spahic is aiming to complete his documentary, The Woman Who Couldn't Forget: The Iris Chang Story, in time for the massacre's 70th anniversary in December.

That anniversary is partly why Nanjing is arousing such interest; as Guttentag says, it's "a round number that'll get everybody's attention." Creative competition is another factor. The completion of Nanking "pushes the other people to get their projects made," says Leonsis. And, of course, the issues involved in the story of Nanjing continue to resonate: as China's rise reshapes Asian geopolitics, tensions between it and Japan have greater global relevance. These days, "anything important to China and Japan axiomatically becomes important to the West," says Guttentag.

For sure, there are few subjects more important to the two countries than their painful history. The 2005 Japanese textbook controversy ignited long-smoldering resentment in China; that spring, tens of thousands of Chinese took to the streets as mobs burned Japanese flags, overturned Japanese-made cars and threw rocks at Japan's consulate in Shanghai. Part of that animosity can be attributed to historical myopia on the Chinese side: mainland textbooks omit anything that casts the Communist Party in a bad light, glossing over, for example, the horror of the Cultural Revolution. Japan's wartime atrocity thus stands out starkly as the great injustice of China's modern history. And with nationalist education increasing in the wake of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, says Kingston, "younger Chinese know a lot more about their unhappy shared history with Japan than their elders."

Japan hasn't convinced China to forgive, either. Tokyo's repeated apologies for its militaristic past have never been remorseful enough for many Chinese. And Japan's former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi further fanned the flames by visiting the Yasukuni Shrine, which honors Japan's war dead—among them several class-A war criminals executed after the Tokyo trials, including the general in charge at Nanjing.

Mizushima, for one, won't be building any bridges between Japan and China. He says he has already raised half of the $2.5 million he needs for his film, which he vows will prove "the massacre did not happen." Few outside observers expect him to succeed. As Guttentag puts it: "There's an extraordinary amount of evidence that shows that it did. There's forensic evidence, there's photographic evidence, there's film evidence, there's eyewitness testimony. I mean, what else do you need?"

Mizushima's film may have one benefit, sparking enough controversy to get more people talking about the burdens of the past. Spahic, director of the documentary about Chang, expects all this cinematic interest to help "open a dialogue" on Nanjing's legacy. There are even signs that reconciliation might not be out of the question. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has taken pains to mend fences with China in his first months in office, and Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao is scheduled to visit Japan in April. As Kingston says, both sides are coming to the realization that "this relationship is far too important to hold hostage to history."

With reporting by Ling Woo Liu / Hong Kong and Michiko Toyama / Tokyo

• Tim Morrison