Mohamed is a career pirate. He’s been hitched to a handful of women throughout his adulthood, and he’s currently locked into a new engagement that will see him married once more, but his heart truly belongs to the sea. The reason is clear after spending just a few minutes with him in his impoverished hometown: piracy pays handsomely, both in cash and in notoriety. If nothing else, it certainly beats the back-breaking alternative of busting up rocks in dusty old quarries for next to nothing. That’s why, even on threat of annulment and against the wishes of his desperate parents, Mohamed can’t help but plan one final act of maritime treachery. Morals be damned, it’s a pirate’s life for him.
This sounds like the IMDB summary of the latest thriller concerned with global oceanic theft, but Mohamed isn’t a fictional character. He’s a very real human being, and he’s one of the most experienced pirates in the world capital of piracy, Somalia. The idea of catching up with Mohamed and committing his story to cinema sounds far fetched. Simply getting access to him seems a Herculean task, to say nothing of the logistics of filming him as he cooks up an ill-advised piracy scheme in the days leading up to his nuptials. But that’s exactly what Tommy Pallotta and Femke Wolting have done with their joint documentarian effort, Last Hijack, and the fruits of their labors make for compelling, provocative viewing.
Last year, the movies treated Somali piracy as a stage for entertainment. Chiefly, this is thanks to Paul Greengrass’ excellent true story drama, Captain Phillips, though ample credit should be accorded to the Danish thriller A Hijacking, too. Both pictures find thrills either in recreating or in pantomiming real acts of banditry on the high seas, installing buccaneers as their heavies and hapless white boatmen as their protagonists. Last Hijack takes us past all of that via Mohamed’s daily existence; we meet his parents, his wife (and in-laws) to be, and we observe the destitute panorama of life in Somalia along the way. This is a deprived land, inhabited by a struggling populace.
Pallotta (best known as the cinematographer on Richard Linklater’s groundbreaking Waking Life) hopes to expose audiences to the bleak realities that make piracy a desirable career path. Early in the film, we learn that piracy began in the 1990s, after the commencement of the Somali Civil War, as a means of protecting local fishermen from foreign trawlers who operate illegally off the country’s shores. There’s a certain nobility to that, though Last Hijack underscores the profession’s inherent ignobility two decades later. Pallotta and Wolting’s lens reveals a widespread cultural rejection of piracy—a radio station in town even preaches an anti-piracy message, despite the frequent safety risks posed to its crew.
Still Mohamed soldiers on. There’s tragedy to his stubbornness; we know that there’s one inevitable conclusion to his chosen occupation. Yet in Last Hijack, piracy takes on an occasionally romantic air, seen in the flights of animated fancy Pallotta constructs in between the moments he and Wolting spend with their subjects. Flesh gives way to cel shading and, suddenly, Mohamed turns from a man into a massive bird of prey, catching ships in his talons with impunity. The subtext here is crystalline—in his mind, piracy is the thing that sets him free—and while the animation looks quite lovely, like impressionist paintings come to life, they occasionally distract from the film’s primary thrust simply by stating the obvious. Piracy is Mohamed’s lifeline. It’s also his Achilles’ heel. That dichotomy alone makes Last Hijack an essential follow-up to 2013’s fiction-focused narratives.
Directors: Tommy Pallotta, Femke Wolting
Writers: Tommy Pallotta, Femke Wolting
Starring: N/A?
Release Date: Oct. 3, 2014
Boston-based critic Andy Crump has written about film for the web since 2009, and has contributed to Paste since 2013. He also writes for Screen Rant and Movie Mezzanine. You can follow him on Twitter. Currently, he has given up on shaving.