THE PIRATE TAPES

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.