filming

(Updated at 5:30 p.m.) Cutter Hodierne, a 27-year-old Arlington native and H-B Woodlawn graduate, won the Directing Award for drama at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

Hodierne’s feature film, Fishing Without Nets, is the full-length version of his 2011 short film of the same name, which won Sundance’s Jury Prize in Short Filmmaking at the 2012 festival.

Fishing Without Nets tells the story of a young Somali father who is forced to become a pirate to support his family. The film was shot in Kenya, mostly on the Indian Ocean, and features nonactors playing the role of the pirates. Hodierne, in an interview he gave for Sundance’s website, called the film “action arthouse.”

“I wanted to make a movie that was as realistic as possible, but to also maintain kind of a grand and cinematic quality,” he said. “You could see how tempting it could be to kind of be steered toward this life. It’s obviously a huge risk and a dangerous world to get into, but when your options are so limited it becomes a more hopeful possibility.”

Hodierne graduated from H-B Woodlawn and attended film school at Emerson College in Boston before dropping out after one year, according to his mother, Alicia Shepard. Hodierne said he dropped out because “I’ve already learned all this stuff” — thanks to David Burkman, his teacher at H-B Woodlawn. Burkman is credited as a writer on Fishing With Nets. Also helping out on the film was Raphael Swann, another H-B Woodlawn grad, who was credited as a co-producer.

“[Cutter has] known what he wanted to do since he was 16, maybe even earlier, and he’s done it,” Shepard told ARLnow.com this week. “It was clear he had a talent for this in high school… He has a lucky blend of being an artist and entrepreneur. It’s not enough to just be an artist. He’s a bit of hustler, in a good sense.”

Shepard said she was intimately involved with the short film two years ago, but for the feature film, Hodierne insisted she wait until the premiere to see the final product.

“I was blown away by how ambitious the film is, how beautifully shot it is,” she said. “I have no real credibility as his mother, it was just mind-blowing to see what your child can produce. You know your kid is fairly talented, but wow. And to get the validation as best director. It was emotionally overwhelming for me, I can only imagine it was for him.”

Screenshot (top) via Sundance.org. Image (bottom) courtesy Cutter Holdierne

When Cutter Hodierne got the call, at 11:00 p.m. on the day before Thanksgiving, he assumed it was a prank.

The voice on the other end congratulated him for his short film, Fishing Without Nets, being selected to the Sundance Film Festival, one of the most prestigious film festivals in the world. After the caller repeatedly assured Hodierne that he wasn’t being pranked — “that’s what everybody I call says” — the realization set in: this 24-year-old H-B Woodlawn grad and college dropout was mere weeks away from presenting his film at the festival that had helped the careers of indie film icons like Kevin Smith, Robert Rodriguez, Quentin Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson and Steven Soderbergh.

“This is just a big dream since I picked up a camera for the first time,” said Hodierne, 24, in a phone interview.

Fishing Without Nets was written, directed, produced and edited by Hodierne. It is a fictional story about Somali pirates, told from the perspective of the pirates. Filmed in Kenya, utilizing amateur Somali actors, the short is a testament to Hodierne’s perseverance and resourcefulness.

Together with producing partners Raphael Swann (another H-B Woodlawn grad), John Hibey (also a co-writer), Harold Otieno and Abubakr Mire, Hodierne managed to overcome challenge after challenge over the course of three months to complete the filming of the 17-minute film.

First, there was the casting of the film. Mire, who Hodierne described as a one-man Kenyan talent agency, helped to round up a bunch of Somali immigrants for auditions in a nightclub.

“Most of the guys cast as pirates were just local Somali guys living in Kenya who looked the part,” Hodierne said.

Then there was the matter of obtaining guns from the police for the filming. The Kenyan government, which has strict gun laws on its books, was not easily persuaded that Hodierne and his small crew were trustworthy enough to be given (real) automatic weapons.

“People are very suspicious of anybody trying to rent a bunch of guns from the police,” he said with a laugh. Eventually, Hodierne got his way — and his guns.

Then Hodierne found himself in a real-life life-and-death situation. He and his producing partners were robbed at gunpoint by a group of men. After giving the armed men everything they had, Hodierne and company were marched out to the ocean.

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