Huffington Magazine Issue 76-77 | Page 66

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young men employed by drug
lords. They hail from countries
with crumbling governments, like
Somalia. Their victims — if they
escape at all — return traumatized, with tales better fit for a
horror movie than a thriller: stories of hacked-off limbs and being
hung naked from meat hooks in a
ship’s freezer.
As a result, the movies based on
these events aren’t the charming
swashbuckling romances of old,
part of a genre that’s been around
since Douglas Fairbanks Sr. sliced
his ship’s sails in the 1926 silent
film The Black Pirate. Say the
word “pirate” today, and “finally,
not everyone thinks of Johnny
Depp,” Mody says.
Of course, what he calls “movieness” still pervades Hollywood depictions of real-world events. Captain Phillips has been criticized for
glossing over complicating facts
and valorizing the U.S. Navy. And
— as in the case of A Hijacking,
which is also based on a true story
— it tackles an incident that ended
in a relatively happy ending, as far
as piracy goes.
But when it comes to telling
all sides of a complicated story,
a glut of movies is promising for
its potential diversity. “There are

BEHIND
THE SCENES

HUFFINGTON
11.24-12.01.13

There are some things you
can’t do with a mass-market
film, in terms of giving the bad
guys nuance, whereas you can
with a low-budget film.”
some things you can’t do with a
mass-market film, in terms of giving the bad guys nuance, whereas
you can with a low-budget film,”
Nash says. Fishing Without Nets,
for example, will be told from the
perspective of the pirates.
Mody says each of these movies is fresh because we rarely see
things from a seafarer’s point of
view, either pirate or captive. “The
life the seafarer faces is one of solitude and not being connected,” he
says. “It’s a life of being out
of sight and out of mind.”

Pilou Asbæk
appears in
the 2012
film, A
Hijacking,
about a
Danish cargo
ship hijacked
by Somali
pirates.