“As documentarians, we had to be prepared to tell the story if these people had in fact done something bad,” says Jones. We even built a replica of a lifeboat with collapsible sides to see if it was possible to hide unseen,” says Jones. “On examination, all the claims fell apart very quickly. The six Chinese survivors were variously accused of being stowaways on the Titanic, of hiding themselves in the ship’s lifeboats, and of jumping the queue by disguising themselves in female clothing and answering to the call of women and children first. It quickly began trending and within 24 hours had got 22 million hits.”įinancing for “The Six” then came together quite quickly, allowing the producers to dig deeper into archives and begin production.
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“Then, in 2017, Pear TV somehow got hold of our trailer and put it on Weibo (China’s equivalent of Twitter). And it started to get distributors interested in our project,” says Jones.
That changed how people regarded documentary features, justice and modern China. “First was ‘Twenty-Two,’ a film about the Chinese comfort women under Japanese occupation. But then two things happened,” says Jones. In 2016, following my usual habit, I cut a funding trailer with the intention to pitch the project at festivals. “Steven was already aware of the Chinese survivors of the Titanic sinking, but it took some time to convince me that it would not be too grim.
(Canada passed an anti-Chinese “Exclusion Act” only a few years later in 1923.) and Canada has trickled down and colored the lives of their descendants today. The discrimination the Titanic survivors faced in the U.S., U.K. These people turned out to be the perfect model for the illegal immigrant stereotype,” Jones told Variety. But we soon discovered extraordinary parallels with today. “We didn’t start with a (sociological) angle. Instead, their point of departure was their passion for diving and maritime history and the idea of making a follow-up shipwreck film to their 2013 picture “The Poseidon Project.” That documented the sinking of Britain’s most advanced submarine off the China coast in 1931 and how, against the odds, some sailors survived. Filmmakers Arthur Jones and Steven Schwankert, both long-term foreign residents in China and both former Variety correspondents, did not set out with a socio-political agenda.
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