The Sinking of the Lisbon Maru review – British wartime tragedy told with potent empathy

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…