Huffington Magazine Issue 76-77 | Page 65

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.