Once were Warriors

This is a movie which is recommended by my husband Kai. He said that he watched it 12 years ago, and he felt it really good in the sense of the heavy historical and humanity messages it carried. So he watched it again together with me last night and made a remark, something like 'I told you it's heavy', afterward.
Well, to me, it is just heavy in a normal scale, while it is imaginably a story happening unspecific everywhere in human society. What do I rather incline to say is, that people do not have to be warriors once for possessing pride or self-respect. What really interests me is, that in what way the pride of human being would get lost, or what are the blockage for people to develop their self-respect. I guess there must be a series of psychological literature which have explored in depth on this topic already, and I think that this might be the area that the movie failed or forgot to touch.