It has been too cold to do much except watch movies lately. We are always looking for good Scandinavian films, so I was excited when Netflix turned up a few, including A Hijacking, (Kapringen), a Danish film about Somali pirates.
In the fall we saw Captain Phillips, and although I liked the film, it didn’t sit well with me. The way the overwhelming force of the US Navy and Navy Seals were brought to bear on the three hapless pirates made me uneasy. I know it’s probably supposed to make me feel good and safe, and lord knows I didn’t want Tom Hanks to die! Whereas Zero Dark Thirty had made me feel good about our clinical yet lethal force directed against terrorists, less than a year later I was squirming in my seat. It may be because I’d read so much press about how “sensitive” the film was to the pirates, who were played by Somali immigrants from Minneapolis. They were shown as “complex” people facing a desperate situation.
Maybe because I had just started working with a nonprofit that helps Somali immigrants in St. Cloud, a small city of 80,000 that now is home to 6-8,000 East African immigrants and refugees, I was hoping for even more sensitivity and complexity.
A Hijacking is a low budget film that also used amateur actors. Some of the Somalis who played the pirates were recruited from the port of Mombasa, Kenya. Crew members were actual sailors who had been on a hijacked ship the year before. And the security chief for the Danish company who handles the negotiations, and who is brilliant, is an actual security chief for a Danish shipping company.
They could have just as easily called this film A Negotiation, although that isn’t quite as dramatic sounding, is it. This film, unlike the one based on Captain Richard Phillips’s memoir, strikes me in every way as true. And it’s much more psychological and gripping than the American film.
One important aspect is that the pirates bring with them a “professional negotiator.” He wants to distance himself as just a hired professional, but of course, he is a pirate. He just dresses better and speaks perfect English. Meanwhile, back in Denmark, another specialist is brought in to direct operations. He works with the security chief to bargain over the ransom. There is a process here. Our protagonist on the ship is the cook. Without much “real” violence, we see him taken apart psychologically and emotionally by the experience. This is the war and he is the soldier.
I highly recommend A Hijacking. Especially if you saw Captain Phillips, whether you liked it or not. It doesn’t have any answers to piracy or cast blame. It is a picture of how things work in the global economy when you can’t call in the navy seals.