Fishing Without Nets, 120 mn.
Director: Cutter Hodierne
Vice Films, 2013

First presented as a short film in 2012 [which won the Grand Jury Prize in Short Filmmaking at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, NEd], director Cutter Hodierne is back to Sundance this year with Fishing Without Nets as a feature film. The two-hour suspenseful movie features Abdi, a Somali fisherman, who is facing hardships in supporting his family. In the absence of any good prospects for jobs, Abdi decided to get his family smuggled out to Yemen in order to escape the worsening living conditions in their fishing hometown. Left alone and conflicted by his situation, Abdi gave in to a friend's idea to join a group of pirates. They took hostage an oil tanker where Abdi befriended Victor, one of the hostages. The hostage taking did not go as planned and resulted into infighting among pirates that left Abdi locked on the oil tanker but he was finally able to escape and collect the ransom dropped by an airplane.

FISHING WITHOUT NETS - Trailer from mynameisCutter.com on Vimeo.

Beyond the action and suspenseful Hollywood-style that the narrative displays, the movie presents many layers in its examination of the issue of piracy in the Horn of Africa. The innovative approach consists in presenting piracy from the pirates' perspective. It is a perspective from the inside that sheds light on the conditions that have contributed to the emergence of piracy off the coast of Somalia. These conditions include years of war and famine that have left Somalis struggling for their daily bread.

Fishing Without Nets is a film that humanizes the Somali pirates, which contrasts with the usual media coverage of them as greedy criminals. And also unlike the usual outcome with the pirates taking home millions of dollars in ransom money, their failure to secure the ransom underlines the director's intention to get the story as close to reality beyond the attention-grabbing news headlines. The pirates do not always win in their enterprises.

In addition to presenting the pirates' perspective, the film took a very interesting approach by focusing on the personal drama that is at play. The main character of the film embodies this drama in the face of many moral dilemmas. If Abdi claims that "a man is not a man until he can feed his family", he finds himself in a situation where he must make tough decisions that will have long-lasting consequences for everybody.
One of the moral dilemmas facing Abdi is not only to find just means to support his family, but also to maintain that moral integrity while confronting the reality of a crippling poverty with no end in sight. Caught up in a complex and intricate web of conflicts, Abdi compares his situation to that of the hostage Victor: "you and me are both in jail", which means that they are both captives of situations that are beyond their control. This observation demonstrates not only the dialectical relationship of the hostage-taker and his hostage, but also suggests that there is no clear winner in this situation.



Abdi's personal drama took a different turn when the Somali smugglers whom he already paid for the passage of his family to Yemen are now holding his family captive. The smugglers are demanding the payment of a ransom for the release of Abdi's wife and son. How to separate the good guys from the bad ones or who is to the blame for the situation in Somalia? The answers to these questions are not as straightforward as they might seem. And that where lies the interest of this film in showing that there is always more than one side to a story no matter which side of the story gets the most attention or gets told more often. In the end, Fishing Without Nets shows a good family man who is trying to support his family, but he will also need to reconcile himself with the moral dilemmas of his actions.

Dr. Boukary Sawadogo
Assistant Professor African Cinemas and French
Marlboro College, USA