Fielding questions after a free “special screening” of his adaptation of his own “documentary-style novel,” Zhenyun Liu interjected the black humor which has helped make his writing famous at home, often as TV or cinema drams. The exciting force in “Spielberg of China” director and Liu’s frequent collaborator Xiaogang Feng’s Back to 1942 is the little-known Henan Province famine of that Second Sino-Japanese War year. The writer thanked the audience for sitting through the hundred fifty-one minutes, adding that the having delayed supper would sharpen their appreciation of that force.

“Remembering” or “reminding of” the time would have been a better film title translation for this, China’s foreign-language Oscar submission, in Mandarin subtitled in both traditional Chinese characters and English. He himself had not learned of the events until an elderly relative related them decades later, and he tied them into the end narrational voice’s life. Misjudging a New York audience, he sensed its upset and tried to clarify his numerical comparison to the Holocaust and Auschwitz; in any case, an apter parallel would have been to the more surprisingly (because Western) unknown “Europe’s Hidden Holocaust” of Stalin-caused famine and death of five million Ukrainians in Europe’s breadbasket.

The film breathes not a single word of the Communists, although the scores of thousands of starving refugees stream towards Mao’s Shaanxi (Shensi) Province. “A good question,” one of Liu’s few untranslated responses, in accented English, drew laughter but failed to address that omission. Admittedly, the writer did elsewhere mention censorship, but that makes it even odder that oft-vilified Nationalist (Kuomintang) Generalissimo Chiang Kai shek (Daoming Chen) and his feared wife Madam Chiang are given relatively sympathetic kid-gloves treatment.

“Like an egg crashing into iron,” the book and movie’s black humor is intended to make this “sadder than any tragedy, even sadder.” Six months’ shooting, on a budget generous for China but not for here, was the result of preparation during an unbelievable claimed twenty-plus years. Less successful domestically than usual for Feng, this DCP version is but part of the total footage, but it remains puzzling that with so much time the result is still far from tightened enough.

Like The Children of Huang Shi and more so The Flowers of War in seeking a hook for wider viewership, there are familiar faces, Tim Robbins as old China hand Bishop Megan and Adrien Body as Theodore H. White, the Time correspondent who embedded and forced the issue into the light. However, both characters are cardboard and could have been cut with no loss, along with others like priest Sim (Hanyu Zhang).

The takeoff point for this “historical disaster epic” is the famine that results in immense, mostly civilian suffering, millions of displaced persons and at least three million deaths -- officially, “1,062” -- along the road so graphically pictured. Drought, wind, locusts, vermin, diseases of crops and humans were initial causes, then exacerbated by political arrogance, infighting, incompetence and corruption, and by military expedience that expropriated millet and other grain to feed soldiers to fight while leaving non-combatants to die.

In Luoyang, new, well-intentioned Governor Peiji Li (Xuejian Li) faces too many factions to alleviate the situation. “Bandits” who are no more than desperate starving peasants scour the province, as even well-to-do landlords like Master Dianyuan Fan (Guoli Zhang) are forced out onto the road, too, along with their families and retinues, in his case an aged mother, wife, daughter, pregnant just-widowed daughter-in-law, grandchildren and loyal hired hand Shuanzhu (Ma Zhang).

Endless columns trudge in freezing weather, ill clothed and fed -- though actors do not look malnourished -- cooking pets and work animals and resorting to cannibalism, refused entry into walled cities, selling their womenfolk for food and safety, abused by Chinese soldiers and bombed and strafed by Japanese planes. The latter such scenes, of indiscriminate terror from the air, are most visually effective, and one enemy official’s remark that the victims are human beings, too, is in tune with Feng’s attempted political neutrality.

“There’s nobody left.” Having lost all family and possessions, even to a newest grandchild in ironic fashion, exhausted Fan reverses and heads back, to die among whatever is left of home. Liu listed as a personal favorite “dramatic moment” Fan’s meeting with equally family-less new “Sweetie grandchild” and the pair’s affirmation of survival. This Grapes of Wrath end-moment is romantic melodrama, however conveniently it justifies the tale years later. The film could do with more pruning and fewer such moments and undeveloped characters.

(Released by China Lion Entertainment; not rated by MPAA.)