Director Ben Steele on how he and his team made BBC Current Affairs investigative doc, Dead Calm Killing in the Med?, a programme uncovering the truth behind accusations that EU funded Greek forces are forcing migrants bound for Europe back out to sea at gunpoint.
I love investigative journalism because the stories we tell are so unbelievable, if we didn’t have truth on our side, no-one would believe them.
Imagine if you can, masked agents on European beaches, funded by EU budgets, hunting down men, women and children who reach European soil, forcing people back out to sea at gunpoint where they are sometimes abandoned without food or water on motorless rafts, and at other times simply thrown into the sea to drown – these are the allegations we started to uncover as we began researching this film.
The story of migration is one of the biggest stories that’s shaping our world, but this project always felt like something only the BBC could make, given its complexity and its limited commercial appeal. We were incredibly lucky to have Mike Radford as our exec, who along with Commissioning Editor Joanna Carr and BBC2 championed the film.
From our very first meeting, Mike and I committed to a narrative approach that would build intrigue and ignite curiosity. We both wanted this to feel enticing and look cinematic but based on impactful, hard-nosed journalism. The BBC embraced our desire to shoot this 2.35:1 using my Arri Amira and EF mount primes (using my lighter Canon c300ii and Canon c70 as additional cameras for the master interviews). Production Manager Farah Karim held money in reserve for an underwater shoot for the end of the edit. Mike committed to not only avoiding commentary, but to using as few cards as possible. The story was going to be complex, but we couldn’t tell people what to think, and had to trust the viewer’s intelligence.
Narratively, our starting point was the last voyage of a Libyan fishing trawler, called the Adriana, that capsized in the Mediterranean last summer, in the same week as Barak Obama and Tom Hanks enjoyed a joint family holiday in Greece. Over 600 men, women and children, drowned in the idyllic crystal blue waters of the Med that so many of us dream of swimming in.
In the aftermath it emerged Greek military assets had been following the trawler for many hours and EU agents knew the boat was in crisis (and that people had started to die onboard) yet no mayday SOS call was made until after the Adriana had sunk. Unanswered questions started to swirl. Why did the boat spontaneously capsize in dead calm waters, after five days at sea? How come a Greek coastguard boat was present the moment the Adriana sank? Why did many survivor accounts appear to contradict official accounts?
Together with the tenacious and super-efficient producer Lucile Smith, we started to investigate and spoke with many survivors, but decided to formally interview just two. Abdelrahman and Mohammed both had a positive approach to the idea of filming, and shared a strong desire to let others know what happened to the Adriana. Lucile and I found ourselves falling down a rabbit hole, and the deeper we fell, the more disturbing and compelling the evidence became. But as always with an ambitious current affairs project we needed some luck.
The first piece of luck came in the autumn of 2023 when we travelled to Vienna to meet potential contributor Fayad Mulla, who earlier that year had released footage from a hilltop of masked operatives dragging women and children – including babies – from the back of an unmarked van onto a speed boat, from where they were loaded onto an official coastguard vessel and then dumped at sea. With incredible foresight he’d asked his friend Davide Marchesi to film him – whilst he shot the long lens material of migrants being forced out to sea – and would we like to see the rushes? Suddenly we didn’t just have the ‘smoking gun’ archive that proved the existence of illegal forced returns, we now had an entire sequence we could build in the present tense.
The second piece of luck came that winter when we flew to Athens to film with Dimitris Baltakos, the former head of Coast Guard Special Ops. Everyone told us the chances of getting a whistle-blower on camera were zero, and this was the holy grail of reporting on migration. From the start of the interview, I explained our cameras and mics will be running the entire time, then showed him the footage Fayad had shot. Mid-way during filming, in a tea break, after telling me in English coastguard operatives always follow the law, he revealed in Greek this wasn’t true, and bemoaned his ex-colleagues had been caught on camera committing an international crime in broad daylight. One critic called it ‘the most startling accidental hot mic admission since The Jinx’. It was certainly a clip that caught the attention of the media and helped bring international attention to our film.
When we got into the edit, the real work began as we had to weave two distinct tales into one. To do this we had to set up a film that promised intrigue about the Adriana’s voyage, then revert to backstory and the context of compelling allegations being made against the Greek coast guard – so that we shatter the myth of coastguard as heroes, and then bring the voyage of the Adriana to its horrific conclusion. The final edit owes everything to the brilliant intuitive genius of editor Alex Fry, who knitted the different components together into a seamless, effortless watch.
In our current era, so many projects are built around closed narratives, where commissioners know everything from the outset. Here we had a film that developed and grew as our journalism progressed. But we had the backing of BBC Current Affairs, and this allowed us to push hard and demand answers from EU agencies and to shape a film about how we treat migrants.
In the weeks and days leading to broadcast, we had many conversations with our incredibly experienced and patient colleagues Matthew Eltringham in Editorial Policy and Sarah Branthwaite in Legal Advice, navigating the complexities and pressures on our journalism. The wonderful experience of working at the BBC is that even when the stakes are high, the threats are real, and the deadlines are sharp, everyone stays calm. There is total commitment to protect the journalism and hold truth to power – even when that means weekends and children’s birthday events are competing with a steady stream of emails and zoom calls.
I watched as our documentary led the news agenda that day. It was the first item on the R4 Today programme, the most read news item on the website by over a million clicks and the top headline on the News at Six. It was so satisfying after all the hard work, to know that people had taken notice of this very important journalism, and it was an honour to have been a small part of.
Dead Calm: Killing in the Med? is a BBC Current Affairs production. Ben Steele is Director and DoP. Alex Fry is Editor. George Rigby is Composer. Farah Karim is Production Manager. Charles Brown is Production Co-ordinator. Lucile Smith is Producer. Mike Radford is Executive Producer. Roundtable post-production oversaw the final post, with Paul Koren Colourist and Dan Weinberg Dubbing Mixer.
Watch Dead Calm: Killing in the Med? On BBC iPlayer now
Jon Creamer
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