“As the ship went down, sea water got into the boiler room, there was a huge explosion, and that drew the attention of the fishermen on the island,” Finch tells the BBC. “The explosion had thrown bales of cloth into the sea, and the islanders were an incredibly poor community. They rowed out for the cloth, but when they saw people floating around too, they started picking up people instead. This turned into a professional rescue operation. And there is no doubt, and this is testified by the survivors of the sinking, that once the Chinese fishing fleet appeared and could bear witness, the Japanese army stopped shooting and started picking up the survivors too. Dennis Morley was rescued by the Japanese, but he said he owed his life to those Chinese fishermen.”
Eight hundred and twenty-eight British servicemen died that day, but the rest were saved. This story, and the role their country played in their rescue, resonated with the Chinese public when the documentary was released there last year, and it made more than $6m at the box office, rare for a factual film. Now the action feature Dongji Rescue also hopes to capitalise on the interest.
‘A different viewpoint’
The lavish blockbuster, filmed in Imax and costing $80m to make, is co-directed by Guan Hu (who made 2024’s Cannes prizewinner Black Dog) and TV director Fei Zhen Xiang. It takes a different approach to the documentary. While it was filmed in the historical location of the sinking of the Lisbon Maru, with film sets built on Dongji island, nearly half the film was made underwater, and it weaves a fictional story, where the narrative centres on two heroic brothers (played by Wu Lei and Zhu Yilong) one of whom discovers and sets the British prisoners free, and a woman (Chinese actress Ni Ni) who leads the rescue party. None of this happened in reality.
Trinity Filmed Entertainment Limited“Some of the relatives [of the British troops] I’ve spoken to who saw the film said they were quite upset by the idea that the fishermen opened the hatches, and this was denigrating the courage and efforts of the prisoners themselves,” Finch says. The film also shows the islanders taking revenge against their brutal Japanese occupiers, something that Finch adds also “never happened, those islands weren’t occupied, although I do understand though that Japanese brutality would have been very real in those parts of China under occupation.”