The forgotten

"We knew two of the eight Chinese passengers died, but nobody talked about the six survivors. Most of the Titanic survivors have their stories, but those six seem to have completely disappeared," says Jones, 47.

The Yorkshire native has lived in China since 1996. He once worked as a film reporter before shifting his interest to documentaries.

The Six marks his second cooperative documentary with Schwankert, a New Jersey-born US researcher and historian, after their 2013 feature, The Poseidon Project, about the search of a sunken British submarine.

"I grew up near the ocean. I've always held an interest in maritime history, ships and shipwrecks since I was a little kid," says Schwankert, who traveled to China in the late 1980s.

Stumbling upon the Titanic's passenger list and other clues, Schwankert realized that he could turn his personal interest into a new project, for which he, alongside Jones, traveled to 20 cities and interviewed more than 100 people over five years, as well as read 1,000 archived works.

By studying events around the ship's sinking, the documentary's crew re-created some rescue moments and pieced together the story of the six survivors: Fang, Lee Bing, Chang Chip, Ah Lam, Chung Foo and Ling Hee.

Unlike most other survivors who were taken to hospitals or hotels in the United States, the six Chinese survivors were barred from entering the US because of the Chinese Exclusion Act, designed to curb Chinese immigration at that time.