STOLEN SEAS C+
USA Canada Somalia
Denmark Philippines Estonia
(88 mi) 2012 d:
Thymaya Payne Official site
Much of this plays out like a journalistic exposé, where
this feels like an in-depth television news piece rather than a feature length
documentary movie, as this has a History Channel feel throughout in what is
mostly a historical analysis of a particular event in time, the November 2008 hijacking
of the CEC Future, a Danish cargo ship traveling through the Gulf of Aden by
heavily armed Somali pirates, an event that alerted the world to the revival of
this seemingly barbaric 18th century practice, becoming commonplace in the
modern era along the East African coast of Somalia. A necessary passageway between the Arabian
Sea and the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden is subject to heavy commercial traffic,
estimated in the billions of dollars each year.
The film does quickly get the audience’s attention in the pre-opening
credit sequence by playing the actual audio recording of the ship’s captain
alerting authorities that his ship is taking incoming bazooka fire, attacked by
a high speed vessel with about a dozen men armed with Kalashnikov rifles who are
outracing his ship, eventually boarding his vessel. All of this happens literally within seconds,
where the real drama begins when his voice cuts off, setting in motion a
strange sequence of events that ends up with a hostage negotiations crisis. The film takes us through the process where
the ship immediately veers off course steered into a safe Somalia port city,
and once there, the Danish CEO of the ship, Per Gullestrup, receives a ransom
call asking for $7 million dollars. What
follows is a reenactment of a series of phone calls that initiates the negotiations
in order to obtain the release of the 13 crew members, while the film takes a
deeper look at the root causes of why Somalia is in such desperate straights, a
poverty stricken country that hasn’t had a ruling government or any acting
court since a Civil War broke out in 1991 with no resolution, turning instead
into a nation of warlords, reminiscent of Japan’s 19th century feudal history
when rival clans used samurai warriors for protection.
One of the significant aspects of the film is tracking down
both Gullestrup and his counterpart Somali negotiator Ishmael Ali, as each are
operating on decisively different points of view, becoming a window into their
respective cultures. Gullestrup is pretty
much what you’d expect, a conservative, tight-lipped European businessman who’s
used to seeing the world strictly in dollar signs, where driving a hard
bargain, streamlining costs, and weighing financial options is what he does for
a living, surrounded by lawyers, and plenty of advice from police and hired
consultants. In fact, he quickly hires a
disinterested spokesperson to handle all the negotiations, a professional in
dealing with extortion demands, which typically takes its time, as they are
subject to various threats to hopefully bring about a quick resolution, but
when these tactics don’t work, the pirates tend to grow increasingly
frustrated. Ishmael Ali, on the other
hand, is a unique figure, educated and fluent in English, he’s seen living an
upscale life in Somalia where he nonchalantly flaunts his wealth, owning about
75 camels, claiming owning camels in Somalia is equivalent to joining an
exclusive country club in America.
Having lived in the United States for 20 years, leaving due to the
frenetic pace of life, he’s the lone voice that has had a chance to experience
both worlds, proudly proclaiming one can live like a king in Somalia for about
a thousand dollars a year. While the
filmmakers trot out American and European journalists, historians, terrorism
experts, and even Noam Chomsky, supposedly an expert on everything, but none
provide the rare insight of Ali, who is himself the central figure in the
movie, both during the negotiations and afterwards as he assesses what it’s
like living in Somalia, usually seen relaxed, dressed in flowing robes, sitting
before an electric fan. While he was not
one of the hijacking pirates, he was hired by them as a translator/negotiator
due to his proficient language skills, where he openly acknowledges he needed
the money to give his 2-year old son the possibility of having a future.
While piracy still holds a romantic swashbuckling notion
from Douglas Fairbanks or Errol Flynn in films like THE BLACK PIRATE (1926),
CAPTAIN BLOOD (1935), THE SEA HAWK (1940), or the recent PIRATES OF THE
CARIBBEAN (2003 – 2015 and still counting) series, the more intriguing aspect
of the film is what it unearths about the nearly unfathomable nation of Somalia
itself. Somalia is unlike anywhere else
in the world, a communist state aligned with the Russians before the fall of
the Soviet empire, they were left adrift with no one to sponsor their
interests, becoming a bloody battleground in a senseless Civil War that
resolved nothing, leaving half a million dead Somali’s in the wake and no
acting government. When the Americans
attempted to lead a United Nations mission in 1992 to bring food to a starving
nation, where 300,000 had already died from famine, they got caught up in the
nation’s Civil War, attempting to arrest one of the brutally corrupt war lords
who was guilty of massive human rights abuses and stealing much of the incoming
food, but they paid a heavy price in doing so, as depicted in typical Hollywood
style in Ridley Scott’s BLACK HAWK DOWN (2001).
Since that failed debacle, Somalia has been left alone to fend for
themselves with little to no help from the outside world, where toxic chemicals
wash up on their shores from discarded shipping waste, effectively destroying
the shoreline fishing industry, which was once the nation’s leading source of
income. From the Somali point of view,
the passing ships are simply sitting targets, potential sources of income in a
nation nearly destroyed with a shattered and depleted economy. But all evidence suggests there is no trickle
down effect from the multi-million dollar ransoms paid, as a few get enormously
rich, while there is no foreseeable dent in the nation’s poverty. While the filmmakers intermix Ali’s
discerning thoughts about Somalia with the increasingly frustrating, drawn out
pace of the negotiations, they perhaps believe they are building interest. But the film is more a stream of facts and
information, serving more as a lecture on the tactics of Somali hijacking
several years ago, never bringing the viewers up to date, so by the end we feel
the filmmakers have somehow missed the point.
Due to increased policing from European Union and NATO countries, there
has been a significant drop off in piracy incidents in 2012, where these days,
seen from a strictly economic viewpoint, financial backers are less inclined to
finance pirating expeditions due to the low rate of success.
