documentary film " The Sinking of the Lisbon Maru ", as the first film (first screening) of this Shanghai International Film Festival, will officially meet the audience at 10 o'clock this morning.
Before this movie, most of us didn't know about the "Lisbon Maru", the history that had sunk to the bottom of the sea for too long, and the fact that this Japanese ship carried the bodies of 828 British prisoners of war. , sank together in the waters near Dongji Island, Zhoushan, Zhejiang.
Before watching the movie, the film crew issued a badge to each audience member with a poster of the movie printed on it. A set of data was printed in red on the poster: 30°13'44.42"n 122°45'31.14"e. Perhaps, when we walked out of the screening room, we still could not clearly recite the details of this set of data after 30 degrees north latitude and 122 degrees east longitude, but we knew that this was the place where the Lisbon Maru sank, and it was the closest distance to Dongji Island. Only two kilometers away, we followed the camera through the cold night that the Lisbon Maru experienced in 1942, and we remembered that period of history.
Documentary
"The Sinking of the Lisbon Maru" is not a fancy documentary, it is almost straightforward - the film's director, producer, and the main narrator of the story Fang Li shot the movie "" on Dongji Island in 2013 Later, I heard about the "Lisbon Maru" incident from Zhoushan fishermen. In October 1942, the Japanese armed transport ship "Lisbon Maru" escorted 1,816 Allied prisoners of war from Hong Kong, China to Japan. Due to the Japanese army's violation of the "Lisbon Maru" The Japanese armed transport ship was torpedoed by a US submarine in the waters off Dongji Island, Zhoushan, without flying any flag or emblem for transporting prisoners of war. When the ship sank, Allied prisoners of war jumped into the sea to escape and were shot and massacred by the Japanese army. Zhoushan fishermen risked their lives to rescue them. Fang Li was deeply shocked and couldn't let go. In addition to being a filmmaker who has participated in the production of films such as " Riding the Wind and Waves" and " Birds of the Phoenix", Fang Li is also a geophysicist and marine technology expert who has been in the industry for more than 30 years. Out of curiosity, he led an industrial team to locate the location of the sunken ship for the first time in October 2016, obtained the underwater three-dimensional shape of the sunken ship, and drew a sonar map.
"More than eight hundred young people were buried on the seabed in a foreign land. Who were they and what happened?" After determining the specific location of the sunken ship, Fang Li regained a sense of mission, and he began to "salvage" the sunken ship, and This is a nearly hidden history. In 2018, Fang Li went to the UK for the first time, met with British military representatives, and reached a cooperation agreement. In March, he conducted his first survey in Zhoushan and interviewed the only surviving fisherman Lin Agen (94 years old). In April, the crew traveled to more than 20 towns in the UK, interviewing 18 descendants of British prisoners of war were interviewed and visited major museums, historical materials halls, and memorial halls; in July, Fang Li accepted interviews from major British media and published full-page missing person advertisements in mainstream media; in August, the crew second The first interview in the UK lasted 16 days and nights, and 28 descendants of prisoners of war were interviewed; the third trip in September, another 16 days and nights, interviewed 30 descendants of prisoners of war; in October, a full-page advertisement was published, and another 28 descendants of prisoners of war were interviewed. As a survivor, the crew went to Canada to talk to William, who was 98 years old at the time; in November, the crew went to Osaka, Kobe, Tokyo, and Yokohama in Japan, visiting museums, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of National Defense, and the former sites of prisoner of war camps, and reviewing A large number of confidential documents were even found through a local detective agency, including the captain Shigeru Tsuda of the "Lisbon Maru"; in February 2019, the British team of the crew spent another 23 days and nights interviewing 40 descendants of British prisoners of war... In seven years, this The team contacted nearly 380 family members of prisoners of war, visited more than 100 British towns, collected tens of thousands of historical photos, and interviewed nearly 120 descendants of prisoners of war face-to-face. They traveled across three continents: the United Kingdom, Canada, France, and Japan, and I studied more than a million words of English and Japanese materials. Although the materials were screened and condensed when editing into the film, and there were some arrangements in order, "The Sinking of the Lisbon Maru" is undoubtedly a work with a strong documentary style. The 123-minute documentary film does not have any tricks, only solid It is like a heavy investigative report. The core parties and descendants from the United States, Japan, the United Kingdom, and China pieced together a complete history.
moved
It’s probably been a long time since I’ve seen such a documentary on the screen with so many interviewees, so rich that it’s hard to name most of them after watching it, or maybe they all have a common name, the sinking of the Lisbon Maru. of those who have experienced it. The film not only uses survivors' descriptions, combined with audio recordings and documents, but also uses film-level animation to completely present the countless thrilling moments that occurred in the 25 hours from the time the Lisbon Maru was torpedoed to its final sinking, depicting this war tragedy in flesh and blood. The actions and choices of each party in the film make the audience immersed and empathetic. What's even more valuable is that the crew not only spelled out the whole process of the shipwreck bit by bit, but also presented us with one tear-jerking human story after another.
Those young family ties and longings buried together with the shipwreck, those brotherhoods that can no longer be expressed generously, those innocent and beautiful love stories that ended abruptly because of the war, are lamentable - the war left only a series of stories. Tombstones, and the lingering pain of the living. Some people survived, but never talked about this past event with their families for decades, just because the memories were too heavy and painful; some people learned many years later that the torpedoes they launched hit the Allied British As a prisoner of war, the stress and trauma made him unable to face himself for a long time, until he had the opportunity to solemnly apologize to the survivors; many people traveled across the ocean to China for the first time, just to get to the East Pole Island, to the location of the shipwreck, and to My parents gave me a flower and all their love.
When you see a group of gray-haired British people holding the hand of an old Chinese fisherman they are not familiar with or even know, with tears in their eyes and unable to say "thank you", it is difficult for you not to be moved. . When you see the long list of victims, survivors and Chinese fishermen composed of small names in the rolling waves in the closing credits, it is hard not to be moved. When you see such a story that has never been remembered, but should not be forgotten, presented in such a plain way, it is difficult not to be moved. (Sun Jiayin)
