Stolen Seas

Learnng to Live With the Problem
This documentary examines the background and immediate causes of piracy of the Horn of Africa in the second decade of the 21st century. The format is a chronicling of the on-going and difficult negotiations involved in several notorious cases of brigandage in this part of the world. What the filmmaker Payne discovers in making this film is that this whole geopolitical drama really comes down to a matter of economics. For the past ten years or so, Somalian pirates have seized numerous oil tankers, cargo ships, and yachts in an effort to extort millions of dollars in ransoms. To achieve a balanced view of this very agravating situation that is apparently adding to the geopolitical tension in the region, the filmmaker connected with a number of the big players to hear their version of events. What he learned might surprise you as to the true nature of this issue? The ship owners back in Denmark, the Somalian pirates, the unfortunate tourists, the taxpayer and the warlords all have...

Stolen Seas
I stumbled across this documentary by accident. I wish I could show it to the world! There is a reason why piracy is happening in Somalia and this documentary does a magnificent job of explaining why. This is one of the best documentaries I have ever seen. Please watch ASAP!

Thrilling, intelligent
This is a pretty extraordinary documentary. Framed by one specific hijacking and the terrifying negotiations for release of the ship and the hostages held on board, Stolen Seas is intensely suspenseful, even thrilling. While telling this story, the film also manages to lay out a startlingly sophisticated analysis of the global economic and governmental systems that coincide to organize contemporary piracy, and the consequent difficulties in ending the phenomenon--or perhaps even the intentional impossibility of such a mission. Where so many media reports tend to swallow whole the premise that piracy is simple criminality, a form of social deviance to suppress, Stolen Seas turns that assumption on its head, making a suggestive and compelling argument that piracy is a feature of the current social order--a phenomenon produced by the present international political economy--rather than a violation of it.

If that interests you, you'll love the movie. If you just want a...

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