San Francisco Chronicle, Copyright 2010 If you haven't heard of John Rabe, you're not alone. The director who made a film about 'the Oskar Schindler of China' hadn't heard of him either. Florian Gallenberger first knew of Rabe when a producer who had the rights to his story approached him with the project. 'In China, he is and was a big hero, always,' Gallenberger said during a recent lunch in San Francisco. 'I thought it strange that someone could be entirely forgotten in his own country, yet is such a big hero in a foreign country.' Rabe ran the Nanking, China, branch of Siemens, the worldwide German industrial conglomerate, in 1937 when the Japanese invaded the city. The notorious Nanking Massacre, also known as the Rape of Nanking, killed hundreds of thousands by some estimates, but it would have been many more if not for Rabe. He was instrumental in establishing a safe zone for Nanking civilians, and was credited with saving up to 250,000 lives. Gallenberger's film, 'John Rabe,' which stars Ulrich Tukur, Steve Buscemi and Daniel Br?hl, was filmed entirely in China and has an epic, old-fashioned sweep. And although it can't match Rabe's true heroism, the story behind the making of the film is the stuff of intrigue as well. Once Gallenberger decided to do the film, he went to China by himself, unofficially, as a tourist to get a feel for the material. Spies, it turned out, were everywhere. 'I went to Shanghai first, and after a couple of days, I get this phone call on my Chinese cell phone, for which I got the SIM card right at the airport and I only gave the number to my wife and my best friends and the production company, obviously, but that's it,' Gallenberger said. 'I get a call from a Chinese lady speaking good English, telling me she is calling from the propaganda ministry, telling me that unfortunately it would not be possible that I will make this movie about John Rabe in China, because the Central Communist Party made a ruling there would be only one official project (on Rabe), and this film has to be made by a Chinese director.' Stunned, Gallenberger decided the translator he had hired had ratted him out. He changed translators and pushed on to Nanking. Unable to officially ask to interview survivors of the Nanking Massacre, he was reduced to stopping people on the streets who looked as if they might have been old enough to have witnessed the tragedy. He stumbled across a white-haired man in his 80s who turned out to have been sheltered in Rabe's house during the massacre. 'I don't belive in destiny, but I suddenly knew I had to make this film,' Gallenberger said. 'You realize that history is not in books. It is very much alive, in this person.' The Chinese authorities eventually approved Gallenberger's project, although they pushed ahead with their own film on the Nanking Massacre, 'City of Life and Death.' 'There are only two (1930s-era) Japanese tanks in all of China, and of course we needed that for our production,' Gallenberger said. 'They had to be brought back and forth between their shoot and our shoot.' The two competing projects opened last year in China, and the 700-print release of 'John Rabe' was the largest opening of a German film outside of Germany. Gallenberger, it turns out, was a perfect choice to direct 'John Rabe.' Like its hero, he's a man who seems most at home in foreign lands. The 38-year-old Munich native got his start directing a short film in Mexico, 'Quiero ser (I want to be ...),' which won an Academy Award. His next film was set in India, where he spent two years. And he was in the Bay Area not to promote his film, but to spend a little R&R in Bolinas with his wife, whom he married at San Francisco City Hall five years ago. She is Polish, and the paperwork was much smoother here than it would have been in Berlin. 'San Francisco is also our city in a way,' Gallenberger smiled, before explaining his filmmaking strategy. 'If you come to a place or a country that you don't know, you're obviously an outsider. And you see things with a very fresh view. This view of the outsider sees many things the insider doesn't see anymore.' 