After winning the grand jury prize at Sundance Film Festival in 2012 for his short film Fishing Without Nets, director Cutter Hodierne returned this year for the feature-length version and once again didn’t go home empty-handed, having been honored with the Best Directing award for U.S. Dramatic competition. Tracking a group of Somali pirates, the full-length trailer has now arrived ahead of a release later this month.
Although I had some reservations, I was a fan of the film at Sundance, saying in my review, “Comparisons to last year’s Captain Phillips and A Hijacking will certainly crop up, and if one was disappointed with a look at the opposition in those features, Fishing Without Nets provides a far more thorough examination at the motives of those involved, particularly the group’s internal conflicts. Despite a repetitive second act, Hodierne has crafted a confident directorial debut that gives a voice to those oppressed by this destructive way of life.” Check out the full trailer below for the film starring Abdikani Muktar, Abdi Siad, Abduwhali Faarah, Abdikhadir Hassan, Reda Kateb, and Idil Ibrahim, as well as the full short it’s based on.
Shot in East Africa with Kenyan actors of Somali descent and directed by 2014 Sundance award-winning director, Cutter Hodierne, FISHING WITHOUT NETS tells the mesmerizing and sobering story of the bandits from the Somali point of view. First-time feature filmmaker Hodierne, whose short film of the same name won the Jury Prize in Short Filmmaking at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, combines the epic cinematic vision of a glorious action thriller with the intimate, textured qualities of an art film, humanizing the pirates by bringing us inside their moral dilemmas and gut-wrenching struggles.
Fishing Without Nets opens on September 26th.