BTS: Ben Steele on Dead Calm: Killing in the Mediterranean?

I love investigative journalism because the stories we tell are so unbelievable. If the truth wasn’t on our side, no one would believe them.

Imagine: masked agents, funded by EU budgets, hunt down men, women and children who reach European soil on European beaches and drive them at gunpoint back to the open sea, where they are sometimes abandoned on motorless rafts without food or water, or sometimes simply thrown into the sea where they drown. We came across these allegations during our research for this film.

The story of migration is one of the biggest stories shaping our world, but this project always seemed like something only the BBC could make because of its complexity and limited commercial appeal. We were incredibly lucky to have Mike Radford as our executive producer, who championed the film alongside editor Joanna Carr and BBC2.

From our first meeting, Mike and I committed to a narrative approach that would build suspense and arouse curiosity. We both wanted it to feel compelling and look cinematic, but based on impactful, hard-hitting journalism. The BBC welcomed our desire to shoot this in 2.35:1 with my Arri Amira and EF-mount primes (and use my lighter Canon c300ii and Canon c70 as additional cameras for the main interviews). Production manager Farah Karim kept money in reserve for an underwater shoot at the end of the edit. Mike committed not only to avoiding commentary, but also to using as few maps as possible. The story was going to be complex, but we couldn’t tell people what to think and had to trust in the intelligence of the viewer.

Narratively, our starting point was the final voyage of a Libyan fishing vessel called the Adriana, which capsized in the Mediterranean last summer, the same week that Barack Obama and Tom Hanks were on a family vacation in Greece. Over 600 men, women and children drowned in the idyllic crystal blue waters of the Mediterranean that so many of us yearn to swim in.

In hindsight, it emerged that Greek military units had been tracking the trawler for many hours and EU agents knew that the boat was in distress (and that people on board were beginning to die), yet no Mayday SOS call was sent until the Adriana had already sunk. Unanswered questions began to swirl. Why did the boat capsize spontaneously in glassy waters after five days at sea? How could a Greek Coast Guard boat be present when the Adriana sank? Why did many survivors’ accounts seem to contradict the official reports?

Together with the dogged and extremely efficient producer Lucile Smith, we began researching and spoke to many survivors, but decided to formally interview only two. Abdelrahman and Mohammed were positive about the idea of ​​filming and had a strong desire to let others know what happened to the Adriana. Lucile and I fell down a rabbit hole, and the deeper we fell, the more disturbing and compelling the evidence became. But as always with an ambitious current project, we needed some luck.

The first stroke of luck came in the fall of 2023, when we traveled to Vienna to meet potential collaborator Fayad Mulla, who earlier that year had released footage from a hilltop showing masked agents dragging women and children—including babies—from the back of an unmarked van onto a speedboat, from where they were loaded onto an official coast guard vessel and then abandoned at sea. With incredible foresight, he had asked his friend Davide Marchesi to film him—while he was shooting the telephoto footage of migrants being pushed out to sea—and did we want to see the footage? Suddenly we had not only the “smoking gun” archive proving the existence of illegal forced returns, but now an entire sequence that we could build in the present tense.

The second stroke of luck came that winter, when we flew to Athens to film with Dimitris Baltakos, the former head of the Coast Guard’s special forces. Everyone told us the chances of getting a whistleblower on camera were zero, and that this was the holy grail of reporting on migration. From the beginning of the interview, I explained to him that our cameras and microphones would be running the whole time, and then showed him the footage Fayad had shot. In the middle of the shoot, during a tea break, he told me in English that Coast Guard personnel always obey the law, after which he revealed in Greek that this was not true, and lamented that his former colleagues had been filmed committing an international crime in broad daylight. One critic called it “the most stunning accidental hot-mic admission since The Jinx.” It was certainly a clip that caught media attention and helped bring our film international attention.

When we started editing, the real work began, as we had to weave two different stories into one. To do this, we had to create a film that promised exciting stories about the Adriana’s voyage, then return to the backstory and context of the compelling allegations against the Greek Coast Guard – so that we could destroy the myth of the Coast Guard as heroes, and then bring the Adriana’s voyage to its horrific conclusion. The final cut owes everything to the brilliant intuitive genius of editor Alex Fry, who brought the various components together into a seamless, effortless experience.

So many projects today are based on closed narratives where the client knows everything from the start. Here we had a film that evolved and grew as our journalism evolved. But we had the support of BBC Current Affairs and that enabled us to work hard and demand answers from EU agencies and create a film about how we deal with migrants.

In the weeks and days leading up to broadcast, we had many conversations with our incredibly experienced and patient colleagues Matthew Eltringham in the editorial department and Sarah Branthwaite in legal, to navigate the complexities and pressures our journalism faces. The beauty of working at the BBC is that everyone stays calm, even when the stakes are high, the threats are real and deadlines are tight. There is an absolute commitment to protecting journalism and bringing truth to power – even if that means competing with weekends and children’s birthdays with a steady stream of emails and Zoom calls.

I watched as our documentary topped the news agenda that day. It was the first item on the R4 Today programme, the most read story on the website with over a million views and the top headline on News at Six. It was so satisfying to know that after all the hard work, people had taken notice of this very important journalism and it was an honour to have been a small part of it.