“How little a list of casualties tells the real war!” Based on the diaries of Canadian doctor Ben Wheeler--Anne Wheeler's father--during his internment in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in World War II, this docu-drama is not a “war story” in the conventional sense of strategy and battles, but rather a glowing account of the spirit and its will to survive physical and mental suffering. Dramatic reconstructions of scenes inside the mining camp are skillfully interwoven with newsreel footage of the fall of Singapore (when Major Wheeler was captured) and interviews with survivors of the camp.
Because he was a doctor, the Japanese did not object to Wheeler keeping a medical diary. Unknown to his captors, he kept another, personal account, written to his wife, Nell. In this, he expressed not only his concerns for the men, but his own determination to survive the war and see his family again. In A War Story, filmmaker Anne Wheeler sets out with her father's diaries to discover more about this remarkable man who died when she was 17.