The Children of Huang Shi

The Children of Huang Shi (2008) is a wartime drama you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Roger Spottiswoode and drawn from the real life of Englishman George Hogg.

Hogg (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), a young reporter, slips into China during the Japanese invasion to file a story and instead witnesses a massacre that nearly costs him his life. A resistance fighter named Chen (Chow Yun-Fat) pulls him out. Hogg ends up at a crumbling school full of orphaned boys — angry, starving and forgotten — and with nurse Lee (Radha Mitchell) takes charge of them. When the fighting closes in, he commits to something reckless: leading sixty children on foot across frozen mountains to a safer province.

The story is based on the actual Hogg, who died far too young. Michelle Yeoh and David Wenham round out the cast, and the Silk Road locations give the trek real scale. It's a slow, restrained film about an ordinary man who became a rescuer almost by accident, for kids the war had written off. Stream The Children of Huang Shi (2008) online on iFILM.