Military conflicts have taken place for distinct geopolitical reasons throughout human history, and the 20th century was not an exception. In fact, in the last hundred years, nations were involved in multiple wars, incomparable in their scopes, complexity, and severity. The Japanese-Chinese War (1937-1945) and the Second World War (1939-1945) are two bright examples of massive wartime struggles involving enormous amounts of people from diverse backgrounds and inducing an extremely high toll of dead and injured in different parts of the globe. Considering multiple ethical and social implications of military conflicts, it is not surprising that cinema directors exploit this subject to teach the audience about the importance of basic human values and resilience, and convey pacifist messages to viewers. The movies The City of Life and Death also known as Nanjing! Nanjing! (2009) by Chuan Lu and Schindler’s List (1993) by Steven Spielberg provide distinct perspectives on war and its effects on human behaviors and lives in general. The former picture focuses on the Nanking massacre − an unprecedented act of violence against civilians in one of the Chinese settlements by Japanese soldiers occupying the city, − while the latter movie is a biographical and historical drama devoted to the problems of the Holocaust and the Nazi’s cruelty towards the Jewish population. Although the narratives in the two pictures are drastically different because they depict two distinct historical events, nevertheless, they share some common semantic features. The comparative analysis, which will be conducted in this paper, will help reveal similarities and differences in the directors’ interpretations of world history and wars. The City of Life and Death reveals a page in a chronicle of the word genocide, little-known for a Western viewer. In December 1937, less than six months after the outbreak of the Japanese-Chinese War, Japan’s Imperial Army captured Nanjing, which was the capital of China at that time. In the city hastily left by the Chinese government, the civilian population was left under the rule of the occupiers. As a result, mass destruction started, and up to 300 thousand people were tortured and killed (“The Death Toll: Early Estimates”). The historical evidence revealed in recent years confirms numerous episodes of mass torture and sadism that happened in Nanking. Due to a large scope of the tragedy, Lu Chuan could not dramatize all the details of the “Asian Holocaust,” but what the author dared to show was shocking enough. It is difficult to reproach the movie in speculation, as the abundance of naturalistic scenes instead indicates the director’s attempt to maintain an objective approach. The City of Life and Death continued the series of grand artistic epics about the steadfastness of the human spirit in wartime, such as Schindler’s List . Steven Spielberg’s picture tells the story of a German entrepreneur who saved thousands of Polish Jews from death in concentration camps. Just like Lu Chuan’s movie, it is based on real historical events. However, Spielberg’s cinema obtained almost a documentary quality because, during its creation, the director used the eviden