The Panther Bay
Pirate Blog

One of the great things about being young is we have no fear. And that certainly is true for Mohamed Ashareh, the former Canadian college student who set out two years ago to film a documentary on the Somali pirates.

According to the Toronto Star (March 25, 2011): "As well as recounting Ashareh's near-death experiences, The Pirate Tapes tells the story of Somalia's multi-million-dollar piracy business, shedding light on the history and political corruption that turned fishermen into violent vigilantes."

Unfortunately, Ashareh fell out with the production company, Palmira PDR, so he's not part of the current release strategy. (It sounds like Ashareh has also learned a few unfortunate things about contracts and the business of film production along the way.)

Hot Docs bills itself as North America's largest documentary film festival and is set to take place from April 28th through May 8th in Toronto. Details of the Pirate Tapes can be found on the web site, including a trailer.

Here's the Hot Docs description:

A tale of violence, piracy and environmental disaster spirals into a life-threatening situation when Mohamed, a young Somali-Canadian, joins an armed pirate cell with a hidden camera. But when a rival clan murders the pirate boss, Mohamed ends up in a horrific jail in danger of execution. Interspersed with riveting never-before-seen footage of pirates organizing a hijacking, the film peels back the layers of civil war, history and corruption that turned once-peaceful fishermen into marauders. Massive illegal fishing by Asian and European ships decimated fish stocks, international corporations made secret deals with warlords so they could dump their nuclear wastes off the Somali coast, and politicians siphoned foreign aid into their personal accounts. But the moral justification of retaliation has morphed into a violent, complex, money-driven operation, one that both pirates and politicians expose as a multi-million-dollar business funded primarily by foreigners who reap most of the profit.