Lost war film finds new life

From the Oscar stage in 1942 to a forgotten reel in a photographer's basement, and now, a triumphant return at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, the once-lost documentary Kukan: The Secret of Unconquerable China has come full circle.

On June 24, a restored version of this historic film — documenting China's heroic resistance during the Chinese People's War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression (1931-45) — was screened in Los Angeles, reigniting memories of a shared wartime alliance and a cross-Pacific cultural legacy.

Kukan, meaning "heroic spirit through bitter struggle" in Chinese, was one of the first American full-length color documentaries to receive an Academy Award. Filmed by American war correspondent Rey Scott and coproduced by Chinese American playwright Li Ling-Ai, the film offered a rare and visceral window into the front lines. It won a special Oscar in 1942, praised for its raw footage of wartime Chongqing and its emotionally powerful narrative.

For decades, the film was thought lost, its only known print having vanished without a trace, making it the only Academy Award-winning documentary to be classified as missing. That changed in 2009 when Chinese American filmmaker Robin Lung discovered a surviving copy in the basement of Rey Scott's family home.

"I wanted to know how come I had never heard of Kukan, and how come I had never heard of this Hawaiian woman, Li Ling-Ai?" Lung told China Daily. "In Li's time, the Chinese Exclusion Act was still in place. She helped create this film, yet was credited only as a 'technical adviser'."

Lung's decade-long journey to uncover the truth behind the film's disappearance brought her to China in 2014, retracing Scott's wartime steps and delivering a VHS copy to the Chongqing China Three Gorges Museum. "What I learned was how difficult it is to determine historical truth, and how fragile our visual memory really is," she said.