Alumni Sundance-winning pirate film premieres

Fishing Without Nets, a new feature film created by Emerson alumni about Somali pirates that won the Directing Award at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, is making a splash in Hollywood.

Cutter Hodierne ’06 is the director of Fishing, his first feature film, which premieres in select theaters in Los Angeles this weekend, September 26-27.

Hodierne '06

It’s scheduled to show in New York beginning October 3.

Alex Disenhof ’09, the film’s cinematographer, said Fishing was shot over 77 days in Kenya—36 of them on an oil tanker, many of them on the Indian Ocean. The story is told from the perspective of one of the Somali pirates who joined the criminal enterprise to better provide for his family.

“If people want to see another side of this story [about pirates] that has been really well publicized, this is a good place to go,” said Disenhof, a Salem, New Hampshire, native.

Disenhof said the movie is “big in scope.”

“It’s an epic film,” he said. “It’s an action movie, but it combines elements of quieter, more poetic moments that you don’t usually find in action movies.”

Disenhof '09

Disenhof said a short-film version of Fishing premiered at Sundance in 2012, when it won for Best Short Film. Hodierne then journeyed to Kenya and became acclimated with a Somali community there, asking ordinary people to appear in his feature film, which was shot entirely in the Somali language.

“These guys… were very natural on screen,” Disenhof said. “They gave absolutely wonderful performances.”

Fishing Without Nets was recently profiled in the Los Angeles Times and Entertainment Weekly.

The film was produced by Vice Media Group, and is getting distributed by Fox, which Disenhof said will place the movie in on-demand platforms later this fall.