Aboard the cargo ship MC Ruby, docked in New York City, six stowaways burst from one of the containers being unloaded.

In response, company representative Andreas Vlachos arrives to oversee future operations and warn that the crew will be liable for any more such fines.

He points out that if the stowaways' presence becomes known, he and his men will be fired, and any other jobs they can find in Ukraine will pay even less than the meager wages earned by Ofosu on the docks in Ghana.

Plesin's men are concerned about their inability to locate the final stowaway, but they reason that all Western countries despise black immigrants and thus no one will be motivated to take action against them.

Plesin's final play is to acknowledge the killings but to suggest that he and his men had done France a favour by preventing undesirable blacks from entering the country illegally.

(US) Peace Corps volunteers in Ghana were recruited as extras to play the ship's crew members, although many of these scenes do not appear in the final production.

When the trial of the crew members made international headlines, multiple film companies approached Ofosu to purchase the rights to his story.

[2] Producer John Goldschmidt noted that the Ghana portion of the shoot was particularly challenging, with weather that was extremely hot and humid and multiple crew members coming down with malaria or dysentery.

There were also many logistical problems, as Ghana lacked an infrastructure conducive to executing principal photography for a major motion picture.

However, the decision was made to film in Ghana for the sake of authenticity, and despite the difficulties, Goldschmidt felt that that genuineness shone through in the finished work.

[1] Union Pictures (which had gone bankrupt by that time) co-producer Bradley Adams pointed the finger at HBO and the BBC, saying that he also had never seen any accounting of profits or total budget figures from the two companies.

[5] The Daytona Beach News-Journal called it a "well-crafted drama" made all the more disturbing by the fact that observing Ofosu's true story was much like watching a fictional thriller film.

Nonetheless, the paper did see the movie as "nightmarishly harrowing", calling it a "searing descent into human cruelty", and praising the performances of Epps and Pertwee as the film's primary protagonist and antagonist respectively.