The film, "Persona Non Grata", makes its US premiere at the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival Sunday.
Shot largely in Poland, the multilingual film has already topped the box office in Japan, but it's the first time American audiences get to see it.
Sugihara acted solely out of moral duty with nothing to gain but an impoverished life.
Known as "Sempo," a name he thought might be easier to pronounce for Europeans, he took a position at a Japanese consulate in Lithuania in 1939.
When thousands of refugees fleeing Poland and without money showed up at the consulate looking for visas to escape the Nazis, Sugihara defied orders from Tokyo and wrote as many visas as he could over the next 29 days.
Exhibition of Chiune Sugihara life in #Lithuania. #Kaunas railway station (my photos). pic.twitter.com/92CcEjqxuy— Marcus (@Marrioend) September 19, 2015
When the consulate was closed and he was sent away from Lithuania, he continued to write visas all the way to the train station.
It is estimated that 40,000 descendants of the Jews who received Sugihara's visas are alive today after traveling to the US, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Israel.
After the war, Sugihara was imprisoned in a Soviet prison camp and declared "persona non grata." He was returned to Japan in 1947, where he led a modest life until his death, with few people knowing of his wartime deeds.
Sugihara saved thousands from the Holocaust. He finally gets his own movie! https://t.co/tH1tcBhkKD#Jewish #Japan #Holocaust — Jew on Shabbat (@TMIJOS) January 31, 2016
It wasn't until 30 years later that he received recognition for his good deeds when one of the survivors he helped tracked him down. Until that moment, Sugihara had not known if any of the visas he issued had helped anyone to escape the Nazis.
He traveled to Israel where he was the only Japanese person to be awarded the title Righteous Among the Nations by Israel's Holocaust Memorial.
Sugihara was literally a creation of the 20th century, born on January 1, 1900. He died a year after his trip to Israel in 1986.
Along with a statue in Jerusalem, Sugihara is also immortalized in Los Angeles with a statue and stone reading: "He who saves one life, saves the entire world."
Chiune (Sempo) Sugihara statue in Little Tokyo, Los Angeles. Sugihara, who died 29 yrs ago today, saved 7000 Jews. pic.twitter.com/eQJywnaVqo — LAHolocaustMuseum (@LAMOTH1961) July 31, 2015
Persona Non Grata director Cellin Gluck told Vice that Sugihara's story moved him because he "seemingly did everything out of his own volition and without any recompense, except that to his conscience".
Unlike German businessman Oscar Schindler, whose motivation was originally driven by profit, or Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who was ordered to Hungary to save Jews, Sugihara had nothing to gain by saving lives.
It ultimately cost him his career.
Oh, boy, I can hardly wait to (once again) empathize solely with the suffering of the Jews in WW2 (and let's ignore the millions upon millions of insignificant "OTHERS" who died in that same 'holocaust', because they simply don't count, do they?)
How many Holocaust movies have you seen about the millions of Slavs killed (many more than the Jews, btw), or the Gypsies? I haven't.
And now Japan bows down before Tribal Suffering, Inc., and comes away weeping for its sins --and perhaps ready to open its purse strings deeply for a Tokyo-based addition of another Judao-centric Holocaust Museum of 'Tolerance' (except for those damned 'Palestinians', who deserve NO tolerance at all, eh?)
Note that the movie is a 'big hit' in Japan, 'topping the box office'. I wonder how big a 'hit' would be a movie about the tens of thousands of "comfort women" from Korea (and the rest of south asia) being raped day in, day out by the scum of the Imperial Japanese Army, eh? Bet that would be a BIG hit in Japan, too (just as soon as Japan admits to it, as they once again just a few days ago denied it happened, yet again. See, they weren't sex slaves; these young Korean women simply dug Japanese soldiers, it was all voluntary, for the great pay and all the fun a Korean girl could want. Really.)
If you deny the Holocaust in France you go to JAIL.
(But if you deny the Japanese 'sexual holocaust' of Korean and other east-asian women before and during WW2, you get elected Japan's Prime Minister, and get to be the best asian friend of old Uncle Shmuel, and thereby, The Tribalists who pulls his strings and makes him dance....)