General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 202610 min read

The Sinking of the Lisbon Maru (里斯本丸沉没)

The Sinking of the Lisbon Maru (里斯本丸沉没) is a 2024 Chinese documentary film directed by Fang Li (方励) that reconstructs the 1942 sinking of the Japanese armed cargo ship Lisbon Maru, which was torpedoed while carrying 1,816 British prisoners of war from Hong Kong to Japan, and the rescue of survivors by fishermen from the Zhoushan archipelago¹. The film premiered at the BFI in London on 15 August 2023, screened at the Shanghai International Film Festival on 14 June 2024, and opened in mainland Chinese cinemas on 6 September 2024².

Key fact	Detail
Historical event	In late September 1942, 1,816 Allied POWs captured in Hong Kong were held in the holds of the Japanese armed transport Lisbon Maru bound for Japan³
The attack	After three days at sea the ship was torpedoed by the US submarine USS Grouper near Dongji Island, Zhejiang; the Japanese had not marked it as carrying POWs, in violation of the Geneva Convention⁴
Toll	828 POWs died, drowned, shot, or trapped in the holds; Zhoushan fishermen rescued 384 survivors under Japanese gunfire³
Wreck discovery	Fang Li's team located the wreck in 2016 about 36 km from the coordinates in Japanese wartime records, at a depth of about 30 m, and confirmed its identity in 2017³
The film	122-minute Mandarin- and English-language documentary; directors Fang Li, Ming Fan, and Lily Gong; produced by Laurel Films²^•⁵
Recognition	Winner, Best Documentary, 37th Golden Rooster Awards; China's submission for the 97th Academy Awards²^•⁴
Production time	Eight years from the 2016 survey to the 2024 release, during which Fang Li sold his properties and maxed out five credit cards to fund the film⁶

Spoilers

Plot

In late 1941, after the fall of Hong Kong, the Japanese freighter Lisbon Maru takes aboard some 700 Japanese Army personnel and, crammed below in her holds, 1,816 British prisoners of war¹⁸. On October 1, 1942, the American submarine USS Grouper torpedoes her stern off the Zhoushan islands. The Japanese crew evacuates, seals the hatches over the prisoners, and leaves them to drown with the ship¹⁹.

The men in the holds pump for their lives in the dark, ordered to work in four-man, five-minute shifts as the water rises around them. They take turns at the bilge pumps for hours in pitch blackness while the vessel settles by the stern¹⁵. The film renders these scenes in hand-drawn animation, painterly and plain, because no camera was there. In the hold below, men who know they will not get out sing "It's A Long Way to Tipperary" between the cries for help; survivor Jack Hughieson, in an Imperial War Museum recording, says he can still hear that singing to this day²⁰.

As the ship goes under, the prisoners break out of their hold. Some are shot in the water; Japanese forces fire on the men as they bob in the waves¹⁹. Then the film's counterweight arrives: fishermen from the Zhoushan archipelago, led by figures like the fisherman Lin Agen, row out under gunfire and pull prisoners from the sea²¹. In all they rescue 384 British soldiers, feeding, clothing, and sheltering them, some secretly passed along to eventual freedom, while 828 men die²².

The film then rewinds to its own making. Fang Li, a geophysicist and film producer, first hears of the Lisbon Maru from a villager on an island south-east of Shanghai, and realizes that the last witnesses are dying of old age²³. He spends years searching the seabed with sonar and underwater equipment until the hull of the freighter resolves on his screens, seventy years after she went down. With the wreck found, the film turns to the harder question: who were the men inside it? Fang Li advertises in British newspapers, and the families of the prisoners send back letters, photographs, and diaries that give the dead their names again.

The film closes in the present. The two surviving POWs, Dennis Morley and William Beningfield, give their final interviews, and the two men's responses to the same trauma could not be more different: Morley is still haunted, finding "faces coming back" to him in quiet moments, while Beningfield moved to British Columbia and built a new life without looking back⁴. By the time the memorial is filmed, both men have died, so their families sail out from Dongji Island instead, over the spot where Fang Li's sonar shows the Lisbon Maru resting beneath their feet, and drop wreaths and petals onto the water above the wreck²⁴. Fang Li said he made the film so that the 828 men who died would not be forgotten²⁵.

Characters

Fang Li is the film's on-screen driving force, a geophysicist turned filmmaker who funds the search, hunts the wreck, and tracks down the families, sometimes to the point of self-congratulation that critics found excessive.

Dennis Morley is one of the last two living POWs of the Lisbon Maru at the time of filming, an old man recalling his very young self, still visited by the faces of the men who died.

William Beningfield, the other surviving POW, chose the opposite path, emigrating to Canada and refusing to let the sinking define his life.

Tony Banham, the military historian whose 2006 book of the same title anchors the research, and other historians supply the archival scaffolding, including Imperial War Museum oral histories⁴.

Lin Agen and the fishermen of Zhoushan appear through their descendants, whose families passed down the memory of the rescue for generations²¹.

Interpretations and controversies

The film was submitted as China's entry for the Best International Feature Oscar but was ruled ineligible because more than half its dialogue is in English; it was resubmitted in the Best Documentary Feature category⁴. Variety also faulted the film's self-centered framing, arguing that the director's presence blunted the power of the testimonials²⁶.

The 1942 sinking

In late September 1942, after the Battle of Hong Kong, 1,816 British prisoners of war were loaded into the cargo holds of the Lisbon Maru, a Japanese armed transport ship, for passage to Japan as forced labor³^•¹. The ship carried no flag or marking indicating that it carried prisoners, which violated the Geneva Convention⁶. Conditions in the cramped holds were severe, with insufficient food¹.

After three days at sea, on 1 October 1942, the US submarine USS Grouper torpedoed the ship near Dongji Island off Zhoushan, Zhejiang, apparently unaware of the human cargo it carried⁴^•⁷. Over the 25 hours between the torpedo hit and the sinking, Japanese troops sealed the British prisoners below deck, nailing hatches shut with battens and canvas; the prisoners broke out and escaped as the ship went down, coming under Japanese fire in the water³. More than 200 Zhoushan fishermen repeatedly rowed out under gunfire and pulled 384 survivors from the sea, giving them food, clothing, and shelter³^•⁸. In total 828 prisoners died, drowned, shot, or trapped below³. Of the roughly 4,500 members of the Hong Kong garrison who died in the Second World War, about 1,000 died directly or indirectly in this sinking⁹.

Locating the wreck

Finding the ship. Fang Li, a geophysicist and film producer who had worked in ocean surveying technology, heard the story from Dongji fishermen in 2014 while producing the feature film The Continent on the island, and led a survey team to the area in 2016³. The search took more than half a month over a 400-square-kilometer area off Qingbang Island using sonar, because the position recorded in Japanese wartime records, based on sextant navigation, was wrong: the actual wreck at 30°13′44.42″N, 122°45′31.14″E lies 36 km from the recorded coordinates³.

Confirming the identity was difficult. The wreck lies only about 30 m down, but currents around the Dongji islands run at about three knots almost year-round, too fast for divers or a remotely operated vehicle to hold station³. In 2017 the team used a magnetometer (instrument detecting magnetic fields, used to find buried steel) flown on a low-altitude drone helicopter; the magnetic anomaly peaked at 800 nanotesla, consistent with several thousand tons of steel and matching the Lisbon Maru's roughly 7,000-ton displacement, and a detailed sonar scan by an unmanned survey vessel matched the original builder's drawings³. Salvage of artifacts or remains has not been carried out: the wreck sits in Chinese territorial waters, was American-administered Japanese war materiel after the war, and is entangled in tons of fishing nets, and British military advisers treat a ship sunk in wartime as a war grave³.

Making the film

What began as a search for a ship became an eight-year effort to record the stories of those involved while the last witnesses were still alive³. In 2018 the crew interviewed the Dongji fisherman Lin Agen (林阿根), then 94, and in Britain the survivor Dennis Morley, then 99¹⁰. A second surviving prisoner, William Beningfield, was found living in central Canada; he had been saved by the Chinese fishermen³.

Because the sinking was little known in Britain, the production placed full-page advertisements in The Sunday Times, The Daily Telegraph, and The Guardian seeking prisoners' descendants; more than 380 families came forward, and the team interviewed about 120 of them in person, visited over a hundred British towns, collected more than 10,000 historical photographs, and read over a million words of English and Japanese documents¹⁰. The film's historical consultant is Tony Banham, a Hong Kong-based historian whose 2006 book The Sinking of the Lisbon Maru: Britain's Forgotten Wartime Tragedy drew on Japanese wartime records and first brought the event to wider attention³^•⁴. Fang Li funded the production himself, selling his houses and exhausting five credit cards when financing ran out⁶. He also narrates the film on camera and in voiceover, and describes it as a documentary drama focused less on war history, which takes up less than 20 percent of the runtime, than on the families, love, friendship, and human fates bound up in the event¹¹.

Reception

The film became an unexpected success in China. It opened on 6 September 2024 to a slow start, then built through word of mouth; within two weeks it had passed 15 million yuan at the box office with more than 386,000 admissions, and it went on to gross about US$5 million in limited Chinese release, with a reported global gross of US$6.7 million¹²^•⁴^•¹³. On Douban it holds a 9.3 rating from nearly 200,000 users².

Awards and Oscar entry. The film won Best Documentary at the 37th Golden Rooster Awards, Best Documentary at the Shanghai International Film Festival, and Best Picture from the China Film Directors' Guild, among more than 20 Chinese film awards²^•¹³^•¹⁴. It was submitted as China's entry for the Best International Feature Film at the 97th Academy Awards, the country's first documentary submitted in that category, but was ruled ineligible because more than 50 percent of its dialogue is in English; it was then submitted in the Best Documentary Feature category⁴. Critics praised its empathy and thoroughness; the Guardian's Phil Hoad called it enthralling and shattering while noting occasional sentimentality, and Screen International found the structure flawed and the running time overlong¹⁵^•⁴.

Legacy

The event had entered official diplomacy before the film: in 2015, during a visit to Britain, Xi Jinping cited the rescue as evidence of the friendship forged between the Chinese and British peoples in wartime, and in 2022 he replied to a letter from the daughter of survivor Dennis Morley¹⁰. The documentary's success was followed by Dongji Rescue (东极岛), a 2025 fictional action film about the same rescue, shot on Dongji Island with nearly half the film made underwater⁷^•¹⁶. Fang Li has described the wreck as the only war relic on China's coastline linking the Chinese and Pacific theaters of the anti-fascist war¹⁷.

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026