Patima Tungpuchayakul, right, in Ghost Fleet (Abramorama)

Ghost Fleet is a harrowing and effective documentary about modern slavery in the Thai fishing industry. Faced with looming labor shortages, Thai fishing companies have resorted to outsourcing human traffickers to trick and capture poor rural migrants from the surrounding regions of Myanmar and Cambodia to literally fish under the whip. The film serves as a painful reminder of just how much blood, sweat, tears, and dismembered limbs lie behind the brightly lit seafood displays in first-world supermarkets. Considering how Thailand is one of the world’s biggest exporters of seafood, Ghost Fleet is as horrific as it is politically urgent.

Directors Shannon Service and Jeremy Waldron follow a group of Thai activists who jump from island to island in Indonesia to rescue enslaved fishermen, many of whom have already escaped and settled down, marrying and starting families, making their return home much more emotionally complicated. The primary person profiled is the tenacious and austere Patima Tungpuchayakul, a Bangkok-based activist who, after a brush with death herself, has dedicated her life to abolitionism.

Service is one of the journalists who broke the story about the enslaved fishermen on NPR back in 2012, and the mesmerizing and crisp camerawork complements the horrific nature of the story. In between our journey with Tungpuchayakul and her fellow activists are the chilling tales recounted by traumatized survivors. Stories of hacked limbs and fishermen being beaten and whipped and drowned are visually retold through highly cinematic and breathtakingly filmed reenactments. These re-creations serve to elicit jolting glimpses of the horrors we have only heard about.

Then there are the scenes of the former enslaved fishermen reuniting with their families. This is gut wrenching, and it’ll be a challenge not to get teary-eyed and infuriated.  The film ends with an addendum, a riveting sequence that rewinds from the moment fried fish is set on a plate to all the way back to the sea where the enslaved fishermen caught it. Slavery is still alive and well, and Tungpuchayakul’s fight is just the beginning.