Director – Fei Zhenxiang, Guan Hu – 2025 – China – Cert. 15 – 133m
The first hour and a half **1/2
The last half hour ****1/2
Chinese islanders under Japanese Occupation in WW2 set out to rescue a thousand plus British prisoners from a sinking, torpedoed ship – out in UK cinemas on Friday, August 22nd
An announcement in English on the BBC, from October 1st, 1942: “On September 27th 1942, the Japanese transport ship Lisbon Maru carrying 1,816 British prisoners of war departed Hong Kong for Japan. On October 1st, she was struck by a torpedo from American submarine USS Grouper and began to sink off the Eastern coast of China. Just two miles South West of the site lies a small island known to the Chinese as Dongji Island… This information comes overwhelmingly fast at the start, accompanied by CG images of the incident. Anyway, you get the drift.
And then, as if to suggest at least one of the directors’ true interests lie somewhere else altogether, there follow breathtaking images of an island, vast spaces with grasses blowing in the wind. And more verbal exposition: two young boys were rescued from the sea by Old Wu, but then the Northern islanders banished the boys to the Southern part of the island, believing them to have “pirate blood”.… Read the rest
