AP PHOTO/SONY - COLUMBIA PICTURES, JASIN BOLAND
Exit
the 2009 Navy Seal rescue of an
American cargo ship, starring Tom
Hanks as the titular captain. Then
there’s the slow-burning Danish import, A Hijacking, aka “the
Somali pirate movie without Tom
Hanks.” Two recent documentaries — Stolen Seas and The Project
— tackle Somali piracy specifically. A feature version of an awardwinning short about Somali pirates, Fishing Without Nets, is in
the works, as is High Value Target, a “high concept” action movie
about yet another U.S. Special
Ops team defeating yet another
band of Somali pirates.
“It’s a perfect storyline, commercially speaking,” says Cyrus
Mody, assistant director of the
International Maritime Bureau,
which tracks and publicizes piracy
statistics worldwide.
Modern piracy dates to the
1970s, when East Asian fishermen
began to systematically attack Vietnamese refugees to Thailand. The
Internet has enabled news of more
recent attacks to travel farther, and
the news is worse now, Mody says.
Since 2008, the IMB has found
that Somali pirates are brutalizing
hostages more often and for longer
stretches, for reasons observers
aren’t able to pinpoint.
BEHIND
THE SCENES
HUFFINGTON
11.24-12.01.13
Modern pirates tend to
be poor young men employed
by drug lords... Their
victims — if they escape at
all — return traumatized,
with tales better fit for a
horror movie than a thriller.”
That brutality has since captivated Hollywood. “There’s a sort
of a natural time period that it
takes for a big news story to turn
into a film,” says Bruce Nash,
founder of the movie consultancy
firm Nash Information Services.
Columbia Pictures, for example,
snatched the rights to the 2009
hijacking mere months after it
happened, but it took two more
years before the real Captain Phillips wrote the memoir on which
the movie is based.
Modern pirates tend to be poor
From left to
right: Faysal
Ahmed,
Barkhad Abdi,
Barkhad
Abdirahman
and Mahat
Ali portray
Somali
pirates in
Captain
Phillips, a
retelling of
the 2009
Navy seal
rescue.