NEWS: ‘Ghost Fleet’ Documentary Film About Survivors of Forced Labor Abuses in SEA1 min read
Reading Time: 1 minute
Ghost Fleet, a documentary film that zooms in on the stories of Southeast Asian migrant workers who were rescued from forced labor situations aboard Thai fishing boats, is already having an impact on viewers, according to Patima Tungpuchayakal, co-founder of the Labour Rights Promotion Network (LPN) in Thailand.
Tungpuchayakal has dedicated much of her life working to eradicate the dark subject matter that the film, which was widely released on 7 June, is based on. She was responsible for leading a series of rescues between 2014 and 2016, saving nearly 3,000 fishermen who had been trapped on islands in Indonesian waters and forced to work on fishing vessels as part of slave trading operations in the region. One of the documentary’s protagonists, Tungpuchayakal said she hopes that all seafood stakeholders, including governments and consumers, hear the amplified voices of the workers at the heart of the 90-minute feature.
“I think the Ghost Fleet film provides very important lessons and it revealed to us that there is this slave labor in the fishing sector and I do hope that this will be the last lesson. This will be the reminder that there will not be this type of slave labor exploitation again,” Tungpuchayakal added.
LPN has started using the film as a springboard to reach consumers about the issue of forced labor in fishing, Tungpuchayakal noted, in both Thailand and around the world.
Photo Credit:Vulcan Productions
