This enthralling Chinese documentary about the torpedoing of a Japanese freighter carrying 1,816 British PoWs in the second world war excavates the emotional wreckage on all sides

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.