Jonathan Teplitzky · 2013 · rail

Jonathan Teplitzky's 2013 film of Eric Lomax's memoir. A young British signals officer, Lomax sails east to the fall of Singapore and is shipped to Thailand as a slave on the Burma Death Railway, where a hidden radio and a map earn him savage torture. Decades later, still haunted, he journeys back to the River Kwai to face the interpreter who broke him - and finds not revenge but reconciliation.

1. 1
   Edinburgh

   Eric Lomax, a railway-obsessed young signals officer from Edinburgh, ships out east as war reaches Asia - and, long after, comes home to this same city a silent, broken man his wife barely knows.

2. 2
   Singapore

   With the fall of Singapore in 1942, eighty thousand British troops surrender; Lomax among them is herded into captivity, the start of years in Japanese hands.

3. 3
   Kanchanaburi

   Sent up to the Thai-Burma 'Death Railway' at Kanchanaburi, Lomax builds a secret radio and draws a map of the line; found out, he is beaten, waterboarded and half-starved by the interpreter Nagase.

4. 4
   Edinburgh (after)

   Decades on, still tormented by nightmares and rage, Lomax learns from a fellow survivor that his tormentor is alive in Thailand - running, of all things, a museum of penance beside the very railway.

5. 5
   The River Kwai

   Lomax returns at last to Kanchanaburi meaning to kill Nagase, and instead confronts a man consumed by his own guilt - a meeting that turns, against all odds, into forgiveness and the peace he had lost.