Documentary shares moving story of POWs’ rescue

Fang Li, who produced the documentary, said: “It’s an untold history. We see the bravery of our Chinese fishermen. We hear heart-breaking stories of individual British families, one after another. And we are angered by Japan’s attempt to cover up the brutal crime.”

Wearing a T-shirt with the coordinates 122°45’31.14” E, 30°13’44.42” N, which are those of the sunken Lisbon Maru, Fang said he first heard about the incident from a ferry captain in the Zhoushan archipelago, Zhejiang province, while shooting another film in 2013.

Moved by the story, Fang surveyed the area in 2016 and, with sonar detectors mounted on drones, located the wreck.

In the following years, he and his team contacted more than 380 relatives of the POWs and interviewed 120 of them, including the only two British survivors still alive at the time.

“While I was doing this, I was totally touched by those young boys, the age of my son. So many of them lost their lives there,” he told the BBC in 2018 after posting adverts in British newspapers seeking descendants of the POWs.

At the end of the screening, Fang told those in attendance: “Today is a very important moment for all of us. Because of this film, we are all bound together for the history, for the memory of our children.”

The film’s history consultant, Tony Banham, a British historian based in Hong Kong, was among early researchers into the incident and wrote a book, The sinking of the Lisbon Maru: Britain’s forgotten wartime tragedy, in 2006.