This enthralling and shattering Chinese documentary benefits from superb material: a dark Boy’s Own yarn from October 1942 about the torpedoing of the wartime freighter Lisbon Maru, the attempted mass murder of the 1,816 British PoWs on board by their Japanese captors, and their rescue by Chinese fishermen from the Zhoushan archipelago. Directors Fang Li, Ming Fan and Lily Gong do an exemplary job of recounting this tragedy from the British, Chinese and (to some extent) Japanese perspectives with a piercing empathy.
An oceanic sense of loss pervades the film. Fang, a former geophysicist and the on-camera presenter here, first surveyed the Lisbon Maru’s wreck 100 miles south-east of Shanghai in 2016. Now he plumbs the depths of time to reconstruct its story, salvaging the testimony of the PoWs’ families, and finally locating the two remaining survivors, nonagenarians Dennis Morley and William Beningfield (who have since died). Morley says his daughter and granddaughter knew nothing about his ordeal; a silence practised by countless others, including the Japanese civilian captain later convicted for his role. His astonished children get the news here from Fang.
Morley and Beningfield’s words, a trove of historical accounts and artful animation flesh out the horror. The British soldiers were transported in the Lisbon Maru’s cargo holds in unspeakable conditions, then after the attack by a US submarine, the hatches were battened as the vessel started to sink. Perhaps to give them the illusion they would be saved, the prisoners were told to pump out the bilge; they worked in four-man, five-minute shifts in darkness for hours. One squaddie, believing he was in hell, went insane. The stiff upper lip factor seems to have benefited the escapees only in the short term; decades later, family members attest to a grim history of PTSD symptoms.
Fang’s even-handed humanism allows him to excavate this emotional wreckage on all sides, even though the Japanese one remains clouded. While he locates the family of the American torpedoman who pulled the trigger, there is no voice from the Japanese military here. The country has of course long since moved beyond the imperial arrogance that finally saw its troops turn their guns on the desperate Brits, but it’s a chilling reminder for our backsliding times of the importance of international law.
The film’s only real flaw is an occasional sentimentality; it could have done without the syrupy torch song over the roll call of the fallen. Otherwise it’s potent stuff; a blockbuster treatment, called Dongji Island, is due in the summer, but it’s hard to see it being more affecting than this.
• The Sinking of the Lisbon Maru is in UK cinemas from 20 March.
