This film is based on the real-life story of Agnes Newton Keith, an American author who was at Sandakan when the Japanese army invaded. The white residents were all sent to prison camps; men in one, women and children in another. It details the hardships that the prisoners went through, including murder, forced labor, and rape.
I'm a WWII junkie, so I found the film extremely interesting. When most people think of WWII prisoner camps, they think of the German concentration camps. But the Japanese counterparts were just as bad, if not worse.