George Hogg (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) is an ambitious young Englishman and Oxford graduate working as a reporter in Shanghai in 1938. Oblivious to the dangers involved in covering the Japanese occupation of Nanjing, he, a photographer, and Barnes (David Wenham), another war correspondent, manage to secure access to the besieged city. After they split up, Hogg photographs a Japanese massacre of 200 Chinese men, women, and children. He is captured and when enemy soldiers discover his photographs, they decide to execute him. He is rescued by Jack Chen (Chow Yun Fat), the leader of a Chinese partisan group. The two men watch helplessly as Barnes and the photographer are executed by the Japanese. They escape but Hogg is wounded.
After having his wounded treated by Lee Pearson (Radha Mitchell), an American nurse, the Englishman is sent to recuperate in a run-down and overcrowded orphanage in Huang Shi. Some 60 boys are stranded there with an elderly woman, Lo San (Shuyan Jin), who tries to feed them with a meager amount of food. Hogg is not well received by Shi Kai (Guang Li). a hardened and violent youth whose parents were executed in front of him. He leads an attack on Hogg, but again he is saved, this time by Lee who arrives with supplies. He wants to return to reporting on the war but she insists he must stay with the boys. With great energy and enthusiasm, he repairs the generator, sets up a basketball court, and convinces Madame Wang (Michelle Yeoh), a local merchant, to give him seeds for a vegetable garden in exchange for future produce. One of the boys turns out to be a good teacher, and soon he is giving English lessons to the orphans.
The Children of Huang Shi is directed by Roger Spottiswoode and is inspired by the life and work of George Hogg. The screenplay by James MacManus and Jane Hawksley zeroes in the quiet heroism of this Englishman who gives up his dreams of achieving fame as a reporter and humbles himself in service to 60 needy orphans abandoned by everyone else in China. It is fascinating to watch Hogg interact with Lee, who has a dark secret, and with Chen, whose reliance on violence as the only response to the enemy, is quite different from his own pacifist upbringing. Here is a film that dares to explore the courage and the creativity that goes into compassionate action in a setting of extreme wartime deprivation and suffering. Hogg's solution to securing a new and safe home for the orphans is the thrust of the adventuresome last part of the story.
