The subject of World War II has been so extensively covered that it’s hard to believe that a story like the Lisbon Maru has largely gone unnoticed. The Lisbon Maru was a Japanese freighter ship transporting over 1,800 British POWs back to Japan to be placed into hard labor camps. On the Lisbon Maru’s voyage from Hong Kong to Japan, a United States submarine torpedoed the ship, leading to a colossal tragedy that left only 700 surviving POWs from the ship’s sinking.
The documentary The Sinking of the Lisbon Maru aims to fill this historical gap and does so in a grand and moving fashion. Fang Li, the film’s producer and director, spent eight years making this film. To complete The Sinking of the Lisbon Maru, Li sold his home and spent 90% of his savings. While many people along the way of Li’s journey questioned the sanity of giving almost everything he had to make the movie, Li wasn’t just making a movie; he was answering a calling. If you see this extraordinary documentary, you will understand why Li never questioned his decision to part ways with his fortune. Telling the story of the Lisbon Maru was not something he wanted to do; it was something he had to do.
Here is my conversation with Fang Li:
The Contending: With your background as a film producer, geophysicist, and historical acumen, I can see why you would be the right person to make this film. What compelled you to take this project on as a first-time director?
Fang Li: I was simply curious. Everybody told me that nobody had ever found this ship. I said how could it be? For 77 years, nobody has ever found this shipwreck. How could that happen–that big vessel on the continental shelf, not in deep water? The reason why is that the Japanese military record was totally wrong. We found the vessel 36 kilometers from where the Japanese had listed its location. In ancient times, when we were sitting on the ocean, you would look at a star instead of a satellite. Today, we have GPS. You look at three or four satellites. Satellites are only 100 kilometers away. Stars are millions of miles away.
That’s why the area can be that big. That’s why I scanned almost the whole area between the islands. Then we found a ship. But then I have to prove that it’s the Lisbon Maru. I sent down underwater robots. Nothing could be seen because the water was so murky. The ship had also collapsed and rusted. There are no visible signs on the ship. That’s why we used an airborne magnetometer and imaging sonar. The precision allows you to match the size and shape for comparison.
The Contending: You said it’s extraordinary that the ship was never located. What I thought was even more remarkable is that when you walked through the streets in Britain, people had never heard of the Lisbon Maru or the soldiers who died. The story itself is so unknown. I don’t know how history didn’t record this incident better. You seemed surprised, too.
Fang Li: There’s one moment when I was deeply touched and even hurt. When I finished the second survey to verify the shipwreck, and we had proof, I was standing on the deck, looking at the ocean. The sun had gone down. Suddenly because I’m a father, I realized there are 828 boys down there, and they’ve all been forgotten. Those boys were my son’s age. Their fathers and their mothers lost their sons. Their children lost their fathers. Their wives lost their husbands. They’re just straight below my deck. That was a painful feeling. That’s why I’m using a long shot of the ocean at the end of the movie. I’m also standing on the deck. You see those limbs showing up. I want their souls to be free and to go home. That’s why I took their surviving children there, to say something to their dad. When you visit their families, you see this uniform, these handsome boys, and their photographs. Then, you see an old death notice from the Red Cross. When you talk to the relatives, they also feel that these boys have been forgotten. I visited families and the cemeteries. There are no ashes, no bodies. There’s just a gravestone. What hurt me the most was Private Kenneth Hodkinson. He grew up with his grandparents. He doesn’t even have a gravestone. His grandparents have a gravestone with one sentence at the bottom saying, “Kenneth Hodkinson Private 1942, presumably drowned.” That’s it. That’s a life. That was my strongest motivation. I remember people asking me, how can you work so hard for eight years and sell your house to make this movie? I wanted these boys to be remembered.
I captured a window in the last two years of my interviews. I found three witnesses two months before the COVID virus exploded. We could not go anywhere. Then, those three survivors passed away one by one within a year. History was captured at the last moment. The soldiers, their families, and the Chinese fishermen–all forgotten. The local villagers didn’t talk about the sinking for the first 14 years because at the time they rescued those POWs, it was the older government, the Guomindang government, before communism. The military force occupied Hong Kong, so they didn’t know if it was safe to talk about it. As for the British families, the Far East wasn’t Premier Churchill’s corner. They only cared about Europe. I told everyone I’m a lucky man. I have a chance to do something for 2,071 family members. That was my personal commitment.
The Contending: As a director and a documentarian, you insert yourself into the story. That can be dangerous because the film could become too much about you and not enough about the story you’re trying to tell. It reminds me of how Werner Herzog makes his documentaries where he’s like a cipher for the movie to flow through. There were times in this film that you were visibly moved. As a first-time director, stepping in front of the camera so often, were you worried about getting in the way?
Fang Li: You really hit the target. I never intended to be a director; I’d rather be a producer. But nobody else wanted to make this film. I only had experience with (narrative) feature films. I started thinking about how I should tell this story. I decided to start with the shipwreck and show the evidence of the incident myself. But later, when I started interviewing the families, I thought if I disappeared from the film, that’s going to be strange. Who is recording? Who is talking to them? That would be very contradictory. I was struggling like hell because documentary directors told me you should never show up. You should be very objective. I said yes, but as a storyteller, how am I going to link everything together? If we do these historical recreations with animation and special effects, we can’t lose the human story of the war. Who are these boys? They are not statistics; they are lives. What were they thinking while the Lisbon Maru was sailing? Then, you want to examine their families and how they have been affected. The issue is when I’m going back to the history and the recreations and then returning to the family interviews, I have to be there.
Even last year, I was still hesitating, but the conclusion I came to was that I should be there, but I was very hesitant. My voice is terrible. My English is not that good. I have a very strong accent. But people told me that a beautiful voice is not right for the film because this is a wartime story. They said your bad voice is good; it’s real. People around me were encouraging me just to use my bad voice. (Laughs).
The Contending: Reenactments can be problematic. Think of all the true crime documentaries you’ve seen, which feel so fake. What you did with the animation was striking. It’s like watching a graphic novel come to life.
Fang Li: You hit on another good point. Many people ask me this question because too many people are used to animation with shiny computer graphics. I did a lot of trial and error because I’m a first-time director. Of course, I referenced many documentaries, but nothing felt right. To begin with, we tried real actors performing. We did makeup for them and filmed some test shots. It turned out very strange. It was much too dramatic. When they start performing, you don’t believe it. Then we did something even fancier. We hired a bunch of animation artists from the Beijing Academy of Arts. We selected nine military photographs that they restored in three-dimensional sculptures with clay. Then, we did optical scanning and digitized all those sculptures. You’ve got a digital man, but he’s still. Then, we used motion capture, put markers in the motion points, and scanned them. All of a sudden, our digital people start moving. Then we put it back in the film. It was also very strange. It still felt fake. We’d already spent almost a full year. Every second is expensive. We used traditional industrial animation–three-dimensional computer animation when we designed the figures. Then, we converted them into 2D. Then we have a new problem. Because for animation, we have 12 frames per second. But you want to impact the film when your camera starts moving. Except that’s 24 frames per second. Those soldiers are like a cartoon, moving slowly. When they bridge to the deck from the bottom of the hold, fighting with Japanese guards, how will we create the impact we are going for? This method is also contradictory. I was almost desperate. I didn’t know what to do. Ultimately, we created something like a painting–much better than those other animations.
As an audience, you are not distracted by each individual figure while you are listening to the oral history. In our storytelling, these three witnesses are telling the story, especially the POW survivors Dennis Morley and William Beningfield. They are telling the story, so the tonal decision is we keep all of those very precisely established digital models: for the vessel, for the warship, for the airplane, for the ocean, for the clouds, for the islands. But our computer graphics are so shiny and beautiful. In the end, we added some pencil to the animation to bring the quality down to rough up the images. So, the whole thing is trial and error. That’s why last year, on August 15th, I did a trial screening in London. One of the purposes was to test the relatives’ reactions to the animation. It turned out everybody accepted and liked it. I met a few colonels there. They said your focus is good; you focus on the human story. It took me a total of four years to finish the animation.
The Contending: This film is about many things at once. It’s a documentary. It’s a history. It’s a living history. It’s a mystery. It’s a detective story to a degree. And it’s also a horror movie because of what happened to these men in the holds. The idea that an American sub torpedoed this vessel because they didn’t know there were POWs on board because the Japanese military was breaking the Geneva Convention by not noting that on the ship. There are many stories of heroism, too, but ultimately, this is a tragedy.
Fang Li: I did receive some criticism telling me I put too little about the Chinese and too much about the British POWs. And I did not spend more time on the Japanese. I’m telling a story; I’m not trying to blame; I’m not trying to question anything. I’m just recording the family stories because they are forgotten. I didn’t have any questions because I didn’t know what to ask—such a painful history. So I’m simply showing them the image of my sonar, telling them where their father ended up. Finally, after almost 80 years, they heard about their fathers. They heard about their loved ones and where they ended up. I highly respect and am so sympathetic to every family because they lost their loved ones, and I found where their bodies are. I told all the news media, including students and professors, that I was not conducting any interviews; I was just visiting and listening. And that’s why when a family looks at you, it’s the same frequency; when they’re in tears, you’re in tears. Looking at the brother’s letter, I was moved so deeply. When I walk into their family like an old friend, I’m part of their family and their story. I told everyone I have three cameras and want to help them tell the world what happened to their loved ones. That is the whole purpose. Many professors in China are teaching the documentary. Now they realize you show great respect to the people you visit. You listen to them because with such a tragic family story; you don’t want to summarize asking the cold questions without taking the room’s temperature. You simply listen to them. But when they hear you are listening to them, they have more motive to keep telling you.
To me, that’s your curating process. Many students ask me, do you worry about a secondary hurt because you brought this sad story back to them? I said, no, I’m sitting there listening and recording as if they are telling a friend about their pain and their long waiting because they know my camera will show to the world. So in front of the camera, in front of me, they just keep telling their story, thinking about their dad, missing their loved ones, especially those who suffered from PTSD–they’re infected. They tell you everything. Then, they feel some kind of relief. When people ask me how I can spend all my money personally, sell my house, and spend eight years finishing the film? I tell everyone I’m a lucky man because I did something for 2,000 families. I brought up the image to show them what happened to their loved ones. It’s my lucky fate. Also, to catch up on history, fill the hole for that part of history that has been forgotten.
The Contending: A lot of the movie does focus on the Japanese and the British POWs, and it’s only in the back third of the film that the Chinese villagers come into play. They heroically went out on their fishing boats and pulled POWs out of the water. The most moving moment in a film with many was the animation of the man reaching out in his hand and saying, “Hello, I save you” in his Chinese accent. It reminded me of the story of Dunkirk, where all the fishing boats went out, and they were pulling soldiers out of the water. This is Hong Kong’s Dunkirk.
Fang Li: I went to this little museum in the UK. I saw this big photograph of one motorboat, a small motorboat, pulling, I don’t know how many, but 10 or 12 little wooden boats going to France, carrying all the soldiers back. As a student in the U.S. in the late 80s, I watched the documentary series about Dunkirk. I was moved, not by soldiers, but by the civilians. The whole of England, the whole three islands, everyone’s talking about almost three hundred thousand soldiers across the strait. How are we going to take them back home? Everybody was in a hurry. Everybody was thinking about how to contribute something, bringing our fathers and brothers home—the normal people’s reaction–that’s what I have always enjoyed: Dunkirk’s civilian actions. The Chinese fishermen didn’t know who was right or who was the enemy. They just found 1500 people there, and they wanted to help them. They didn’t know anything, and most didn’t speak any English. A few people spoke a little English because they learned a few words. That’s how the three POWs were hidden in the cave. Another interesting tip for you, the side story: these three men, Jim Farris, Evans, and Johnstone, are not regular military service people. They are civilians. Jim Farris was a Hong Kong policeman. Evans was a sales manager for a British American tobacco company. Johnstone was a chairman of the British Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong. They were temporarily recruited as gunners for the Navy. What was fascinating about Jim Farris’ story is he joined the Royal Marines for World War I in 1916. When the war ended, he went to Shanghai to be a policeman in the British section, so he spoke some Shanghainese. But the islanders understand the Shanghainese. That’s why Bennington was talking about a bunch of them speaking Chinese. They escape. I visited Mr. Bo’ula Chuan, who hid them in the cave. I visited his grandson. They are not local. They are from Wenzhou. Somehow, his grandfather can speak some Shanghainese. That’s how they communicate. They hide in the street because they are not regular servicemen.
I also want to share why I wanted to find Captain Kyoda’s daughters and the son. After the war, I read all the testimonies in the Hong Kong Marshall Court. Mr. Kyoda was talking about it. He was very sad. He was trying to stop the army’s actions. And he failed at the last moment. And he was thinking about suicide himself. He was thinking about tying himself to the frame on the deck. But the boat, breaking into two pieces, sunk so quickly. There was not even enough time to go down with the boat. So he survived. When I read that testimony, I was touched. This man feels guilty himself. He feels a great burden. That’s why when I heard from his son and daughter, when he got out of jail two years earlier, back in Japan, he also had PTSD—every day, staying at home smoking like hell–two years without going out to work. Later, he worked as a small boat captain on a nearby continental shelf. About five years later, he passed away from lung cancer. Even for this captain, I was not able to blame him. But I was very concerned about his fate after he was released from jail. That’s why I wanted to record all the human stories. But I couldn’t find any clues about the Japanese military and servicemen because their rank was so low. The commander is just a lieutenant. He was killed. That’s why in Hong Kong’s martial court, only one captain (Kyoda) gets a sentence, is tried, and is jailed. I didn’t raise any questions at all. I just wanted to record what the war can bring to regular people, no matter whether they are American, Chinese, British, or Japanese.
The Contending: When you speak about Captain Kyoda, what struck me is that he was a civilian. He had to take orders from the military–he wasn’t military. My dad was in Vietnam, so he would tell you that there are times when war will rob you of your humanity. Kyoda, being a civilian, I think his humanity was on display, and you do a great job of saving that revelation for later in the film because, in my head, I’m thinking, how could a captain allow this mass murder to take place? They’re locking them in the holds and shooting them in the water. How could a captain allow this? And the fact is the captain wasn’t allowed not to allow them.
Fang Li: Dennis Morley made two comments. First, he said that the Chinese fishermen didn’t know they saved a lot more than 300 POWs. Because without them coming in, the Japanese were not going to stop firing. The other thing he said to me was that he was picked up by a Japanese Navy sailor who offered him a cigarette and a cup of hot tea. He was very grateful to this Japanese sailor. Then he told me the British trained the Japanese Navy. At the same time, he was saying that the Germans trained the Japanese Army. I cannot verify this, but later, when I was in Shanghai in the Q&A with two professors, one professor studied Japanese culture. He said, you look at the Japanese Army and Japanese Navy; they are differentiated. They sometimes cancel each other. The invasion of China was by the Japanese Army, not the Navy. Of course, the Navy bombed Pearl Harbor. They say the Japanese Navy and Army were controlled 150-200 years ago by two different family groups. One group controlled the Army. One group controls the Navy. They were always fighting each other. That’s what this professor was telling me.
What I heard from Dennis Morley is that they believe it was the Japanese Navy that stopped the Army. The Japanese Navy strongly advised the Army: You better stop shooting. All these Chinese witnesses are here. You better stop. So once the Army stopped firing, the Navy rescued or collected 600 POWs. That’s why the Japanese government’s reaction to British protests was saying it was your ally, an American submarine, torpedoed the ship; we even saved a few hundred POWs. In one way, they are right. The Navy collected 600 but didn’t say who was backing them. They had more than enough time to transfer the POWs to the land, and they had so many boats there. The island is so close. My conversation with this Japanese research professor was a dilemma because the professor said that the Japanese military’s priority is to protect their own life. I said wait a second; why did they lock them down in the hold? They were worried about their escape? They don’t have weapons. How can they escape?
The Contending: One of the horrifying facts is how close they were to dry land when the ship sank, just two miles away from dry land.
Fang Li: I did an oceanographic simulation for that day. I hired two oceanographers. We did a computer simulation. On that day, there was a strong current–two knots. Humans cannot swim over the speed of the current. They would wash away. Also, they need to get out of the Japanese shooting range. They’re washed towards the south, following the current. Only the Japanese Navy could pick up most of them because they had motorboats. They picked up more than the Chinese fishermen. It’s a complex situation.
The Contending: Out of 1,816 POWs, 700 survived. In the film, you talked to the author, Tony Banham, who had written a book about the Lisbon. He said the survivors didn’t really survive because the experience forever changed them. They did not come home whole; they were affected for the rest of their lives. And generationally, the family that they had was forever affected, too. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a better representation of the grief that people experience for someone that, in many cases, they never met.
Fang Li: You look at Agafe, the American mechanic who shot the torpedoes–he felt guilty for his lifetime. That’s why Tony Banham told him about the event in 2004 when there was a reunion. He flew into the UK and joined this reunion to express his apology. That touched me. In his life, he constantly felt the burden and the guilt. No matter what, he launched that torpedo. He carried that pain for his whole lifetime.
The Contending: You spent eight years working on this film, sold your home, and gave up a significant portion of your personal fortune.
Fang Li: Ninety percent. I share this with everyone. I’m an old man. I’m going to be 71 at the end of this month. I never felt like I lost money. I said I did one good thing. A more valuable asset is this film, and my name will be there on the film. I feel so lucky. My name will be carried on much longer than my life. This film was a much better investment. I invested eight years of time, energy, and some money. At my age, what else am I thinking about? I’m a fortunate man if I can contribute to the families and history. History allowed me to do something meaningful with my life. I’m just a lucky investor.
The Contending: You will leave behind a document that will live on, and you’ve also left a legacy for yourself, those POWs, those brave Chinese fishermen, and the accurate recording of history. What you have accomplished is very important.
Fang Li: In China, I have done almost 130 Q&As in two months–in person and online. What moved me was that the audience was moved. They are Chinese, but everyone was in tears over the British families because that’s a human feeling. I will tell you one story that touched me. A good friend of mine sent me the social network record of the conversation. Her classmate took his son, who is 14 years old, to the theater to watch the film. The son didn’t want to stay with his dad. The son went to the front row to watch by himself. But before the movie ended, he quietly came back to hug his dad. When I heard this, I was in tears.
I was at multiple universities for Q&As with students. At the end, the moderator asked me what words do you want to pass on to the audience. I told all the students to call their dad and their mom. Tell them you love them. I want people to appreciate their family. Appreciate your loved ones. Appreciate the peace. This is the message I want to send to the world—no more war. Just like Bennington was talking about, war is a dirty business. War damages everyone. No matter the enemy or your side, everyone is a victim. Look at the Ukrainian-Russian war. Look at Israel and the Palestinians; all the normal people get hurt, get killed, and families get destroyed. This is the message. I want everybody to appreciate peace, family, and love; that’s the purpose.
At this time, The Sinking of the Lisbon Maru is being shopped to distributors. I’m not the praying kind, but I am fiercely hopeful that the film gets picked up. It’s the best documentary I have seen this year.
