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A German captain is held hostage on his container ship for four months. When the pressure rises and the crew turns away from him, the former enemy turns out to be his only companion. Plot summary:Only two films into a promising career, German director Andy Wolff (On the Other Side of Life, Milan Film Festival 2010 Best Feature Award) is unrivaled in creating a precise sense of place. In The Captain and His Pirate he offers a striking juxtaposition of location — a makeshift pirate camp on a Somali desert and an experimental German psychiatric hospital. In these distant places we meet two men, the eloquent pirate leader Ahado and the troubled former captain Krzysztof Kotiuk. Gradually, we learn the harrowing details of the four months they spent together as captive and overlord aboard the Hansa Stavanger cargo ship. As the men struggle to come to terms with their strange bond, we discover something more powerful than social roles or moral norms: the overriding human need to be understood.
Details:
Feature documentary, duration: 76min.
DCP, Blu-ray, HDCam, DVD
Language: German / Somali with English subtitles
country, year of production: 2012, Germany, Somalia
Production companies: Brockhaus/Wolff, Man's Films Productions, WDR, BR, HFF
(German, French subtitle versions available)
THE CAPTAIN AND HIS PIRATE was released in 2013. It won four awards on international film festivals in Leipzig, Saarbruecken, Munich and Brussels. It was nominated among the eight best feature documentaries in Europe for the Doc Alliance award which was presented during the Cannes Film Festival 2013.
'Director Andy Wolff succeeds in capturing a differentiated picture. The audience observes a man who has come up against his limits, who has experienced his own abyss. This is what makes the film so striking.'
– DER SPIEGEL
– 'A very moving human story by Andy Wolff.'
– Deutschlandradio Kultur
– 'The Captain and His Pirate is spectacular. The film accompanies the captain during his therapy. (...) Simultaneously, the film becomes part of this therapy.'
– TAZ, Berlin
– 'One of the most powerful films at this year's Max Ophüls Film Festival (...) Andy Wolff shows a traumatized captain who was fired by the shipping company, who fights for recognition, and an unscrupulous gangster who conveys an idea how he ended up doing what he does by describing Mogadishu's everyday life. This double portrait shows unbelievable imagery of pirates during hijackings. It is tense all the way through to the end.'
– Saarbruecker Zeitung
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