The 2012 film “A Hijacking” (“Kapringen”) by Tobias Lindholm
anticipates the much better known “Captain Phillips” (Oct. 11, 2013), the true
story of the Somali hijacking of a major cargo ship and the rescue. But this time, the characters are fictional,
and the emphasis is on the negotiations between the company in Denmark and the
hijackers, and the story itself is apparently fiction. Or is there a true piracy case that ended this way?
In fact, the fictive story differs quite a bit in many
ways. Omar (Abdihagan Asgar) is the
Somali hostage negotiator with the captors, but he could have had something to
do with the whole incident. As in the WB
film, the corporate negotiators haggle, and disbelieve that the hostages would
really be killed, but the pirates insist that any deaths or injuries will be
the moral baggage of the company. In a
way, this presents piracy as a kind of warfare or expropriation, not just
theft. At the end, the captain (Keith
Pearson) is actually killed by one of the pirates, and Omar chastises the
pirate, because now the pirates will really be seen as "criminals", not as revolutionaries getting even.
The cook Mikkel Hartmann (Johan Philip Asbaek) also plays
into the plot in a curious way with a friend’s letter. An interesting personal aside for me is that
one of my best friends in high school, senior year, had the first name of
Mikkel, rather unusual.
It’s rather off-putting to discern the rather relaxed tone
of the negotiators back in Copenhagen. There is one scene where a family member of one of the men begs with the company to offer enough money. That would never be done for me, because I'm not a "family man".
The film is available on instant play but was released by
Magnolia in the US in 2012, official site here. I don’t
recall that this film got the attention when first released that it probably
should have. The film can be rented on
YouTube for $2.99.
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