The Apology

The Apology is a 2016 documentary film by Tiffany Hsiung about three former “comfort women” who were among the 200,000 girls and young women kidnapped and forced into military sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II. The film is produced by Anita Lee for the National Film Board of Canada. Hsiung, who worked on the project for nearly a decade, has said that she encountered reluctance at times to re-opening such a painful topic: "One of the other challenges was speaking to villagers in China, for instance, who would not understand why I wanted to make a film on this topic. There is ongoing resistance to talking about atrocities because there is some shame about how they were even allowed to happen." She had also been concerned that her three elderly subjects might not live to see the finished film, during such a long production process.