In Stolen Fish, documentary filmmaker Gosia Juszczak, of Madrid, Spain, follows the lives of three locals in The Gambia, a country on the coast of West Africa that relies heavily on fishing. Abou Saine, Paul John Kamony, and Mariama Jatta all live in different parts of The Gambia, but all suffer the same struggle brought on when fish meal factories were introduced to the country. Since then, The Gambia has been a slave to the fishmeal industry, where anywhere from four to five kilograms of fish are needed to produce just one kilogram of fish meal. All the fish meal made in The Gambia is then exported to China, where it is used as feed for aquaculture, poultry, pigs and other animals. The major issue is that the fish being exploited could be used to feed The Gambia’s local population that is stuck in deep poverty. Stolen Fish will be playing at the 2021 New Jersey International Film Festival on Saturday, June 5.
The film first follows Abou Saine, who is introduced to the viewer when describing the layout of The Gambia and the river that cuts through it. At the mouth of this river is where locals do their fishing as fish enter and exit the river to spawn and feed. According to the film, Chinese fishing boats exploit everything that the people of The Gambia hope to use to make their livings. It is unclear why only the Chinese target these waters, but according to Saine, these boats can catch as much in one night as thirty local fishermen can hope to catch in one month. This highly illegal, massive overfishing also causes the fish to migrate to different territories where they know they can respawn in a more peaceful setting.
Juszczak uses Saine’s testimony to shed light on a concept that locals have developed in the hopes to escape poverty. “Go thru the backway” has become what locals say when referring to fleeing their country and heading towards Europe. Abou Saine’s own brother took the backway some fifteen years prior to the making of this film. While Stolen Fish does not disclose any information about what life is like once someone reaches Europe, the viewer does learn that after those fifteen years, Saine’s brother has yet to receive any sort of documentation that makes his residence legal.
Mariama Jatta is the next local that Juszczak follows in the hopes to convey the country’s constant struggle. Her husband cannot work, so she has been working for the past forty years to take care of eight biological and two foster children. She makes her living purchasing and preparing daily catches that she then uses to smoke. The viewer can easily pick up on the strife that is Jatta’s day to day life just by her demeanor when describing her situation, though the raw details of her struggle are left to the imagination. Juszczak does manage to get a testimonial from Jatta where she describes a home remedy to an infection that is caused by smoking fish, but the cause and effects of said infection remain unclear.
Stolen Fish does provide an in-depth explanation as to how the introduction of the factory have caused Jatta’s profits to decrease tremendously. According to the film, the number of fish that locals were allowed to purchase was cut in half while prices for those fish skyrocketed. On top of that, fish were only sold to locals after the factory had “filled it’s belly.” In other words, locals only had access to unwanted scraps. Jatta fears for the future of her family and her livelihood.
Paul John Kamony is the third local who is given the spotlight in Stolen Fish. Kamony’s testimony provides the viewer with a sad reality of most people’s journey “the back way.” Kamony was able to travel across eight African countries until he was arrested in Libya, on the last leg of his journey. While cause for the arrest is, again, unclear, his strife is well documented in this film. He spent a year and six months in jail with children, elders, and pregnant women who all had the intention of getting on a boat from Libya to Italy. At times, twenty-two prisoners could be stuffed into a three-meter cell at once and many were tortured to death.
The film ends with a gut-wrenching song that forces the viewer to feel something for the people of the Gambia. Cameras follow as fishermen carry baskets overflowing with fish from the beach and into the open doors of a fish meal factory. After watching three separate individuals describe lives that have been destroyed by the fish meal factories, Stolen Fish makes it hard for the viewer to end on a notion that the deep poverty caused by these conglomerates continues to go unpunished.
Here is Stolen Fish director Gosia Juszczak's Introduction to her film:
