When 36-year-old, Chinese American, best-selling author Iris Chang died by suicide in 2004, her death sent shockwaves around the globe. Fans idolized her for rescuing the history she wrote about in The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II. The book introduced the Western world to the Nanjing Massacre when the Japanese imperial army murdered 300,000 Chinese civilians and raped 20,000 women in six weeks.

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Iris became a political activist and sought-after speaker, demanding that Japan take responsibility for its wartime crimes. Her book and activism propelled a global movement for redress, reparations and healing that continues today­. 

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What happens next is initially a mystery: seven years after the publication of her book, Iris is found dead. Controversy swirls: was she murdered? Was her truth to powerful for the world? Or, has it subsumed her?

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The film asks us all to consider what really killed Iris Chang?

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“The power of one” was Iris’s personal mantra—as in, one individual can do anything, even change the world. This became Iris’s legacy brand, the infamous quote by which she is remembered. But what if the pressure to singularly change the world is part of what killed Iris Chang? Was her death caused by depression and suicide she had internalized from tirelessly dissecting the pain of the victims she wrote about? Was Iris, in fact, the final victim of the massacre? Or was she a martyr manifesting her own fundamental belief in the power of singularity?

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Excavating never-before-seen personal writings—including diaries, letters, handwritten notecards, to do lists and goals sheets—found in 400 boxes of Iris’s archives, IRIS CHANG: POWER OF ONE mindfully peels back the polished persona of the focused, determined historian to reveal the pain of trying to attain perfection in isolation and raising provoking questions about achievement, identity, trauma, the agony of mental illness, and the human limits of commitment.