Monga Bay Journalism
“The watcher who vanished” By Rhett Ayers Butler
“In Fatal Watch, a 2025 documentary about fisheries observers who have died or gone missing, Abayateye’s story appears alongside others: an I-Kiribati observer found with a head injury, a Papua New Guinean lost overboard, an American who vanished from a Panamanian ship. None of those cases led to prosecutions.”
Read more here.
FATAL WATCH REVIEW
”FATAL WATCH is a searing and unflinching documentary that pulls viewers into the dark corners of the global fishing industry, a world where the ocean’s silent guardians risk everything to document the truth, and too often pay with their lives”.
Bubba Cook - WWF - 17 years - Tuna Program Manager,
Western Central Pacific
Fatal Watch is a searing and unflinching documentary by Mark Benjamin and Katie Carpenter that pulls viewers into the dark corners of the global fishing industry, a world where the ocean’s silent guardians risk everything to document the truth, and too often pay with their lives. At its core are the haunting, unresolved cases of four fisheries observers who vanished or died under mysterious circumstances while monitoring industrial fishing vessels - individuals whose job was to uphold transparency at sea, only to be met with silence and cover-ups instead of accountability.
From Fiji to the waters off Ghana, Fatal Watch exposes the brutal calculus of a global seafood trade where profit sometimes outweighs human life and environmental limits are ignored. The film’s investigative spine - real people, real deaths, and real families left with unanswered questions - makes for a viewing experience that is as disturbing as it is indispensable. It isn’t just hard to watch because of what it shows, but because it reflects a system where regulatory gaps leave our oceans and the fisheries observers charged with monitoring them vulnerable, where those observers too often "disappear" without justice.
I'm happy to have contributed to this film and appear in it. I really encourage everyone to have a look and recognise that this is a solvable problem. There is really no reason for people, whether fisheries observers or fishing crew, to die without consequence in the pursuit of the seafood that ends up on your plate. There is a website with action steps associated with the film that you can take so you can reduce the potential that you are contributing to human misery through your seafood choices. More importantly, your voice can make a difference by demanding that seafood sellers indicate where their seafood is from through full supply chain traceability, which is technologically and technically possible today, but there is a lack of political and institutional will.
Bubba Cook - WWF - 17 years - Tuna Program Manager, Western Central Pacific
We are honored to receive The Donald Gosling Award for Best Audio-Visual Production from the Maritime Foundation.
The Maritime Media Awards recognizes the UK’s best journalists, authors, filmmakers, digital creators and others whose work in the media has created a greater public understanding of maritime issues, and of the UK’s dependence upon the sea.
The Donald Gosling Award for Best Audio-Visual Production is made to filmmakers that have significantly influenced understanding of, or participation in, the maritime dimension.
Read more here.
Maritime Media Awards
Review of Fatal Watch
By: David Roth
Review of Fatal Watch
By: David Roth
“Benjamin and Carpenter have created a film that reminds us once again of H. sapiens’ capacity for wreaking environmental havoc on a global scale. But beyond that they expose the wanton disregard the perpetrators of this eco-violence have for the lives of the people whose job it is to help assure that the industry operates within the rule of law.”
Read more of David Roth’s review here.
Fatal Watch: Tim McKinnel and Bubba Cook on the dark underbelly of tuna fishing
"FATAL WATCH is a brilliant film”
Interview on Radio New Zealand with Conservationist Alfred "Bubba" Cook and high-profile New Zealand investigator, Tim McKinnel talk to Paddy Gower about the dark underbelly of the international fishing industry and the need for greater transparency, accountability and change.
Listen to the interview here.
Interview with co-directors
Katie Carpenter and Mark Benjamin
FATAL WATCH casts a critical eye on the fishing industry as a whole, touching on management and transparency issues that the filmmakers see as intertwined with the observer safety problem.
Read more of the Mongabay interview here.
"Benjamin and Carpenter open an overwhelming can of worms as they focus on the disappearance of observers”
Read Film Fest Report review here.
