Fishing Without Nets tells the part of the Somali pirate story left out of Captain Phillips
Fishing Without Nets tells the story of a Somali fisherman who turns to piracy out of desperation to feed his family.
While the Tom Hanks film “Captain Phillips” is, in broad terms, about a crew of Somali pirates that capture an American cargo ship, it actually spends little time on the circumstances surrounding the Somali pirates. Fishing Without Nets tries to do just that.
Cutter Hodierne's new film is a fictional story of Somali piracy told from the perspective of a Somali fisherman, Abdi, who is struggling to provide for his wife and child. With his options running out, Abdi turns to piracy. Through Abdi’s story, Hodierne explores how desperation and poverty leads many young Somalis to take to the water, looking for something other than seafood.
“I think that when you’re faced with real desperation, what you see is persistence,” Hodierne says. “When it’s really all odds against you, you have to do everything to survive, and being worn down by that over and over again can really lead you to do something extreme. … You’d do anything to feed your family, and there’s nothing more important than that — so you do whatever it takes.”
The filmmakers boarded a pirate ship to produce the feature film about an imaginary piracy incident. Hodierne says the film is an authentic and freshly visual treatment of a story we never see — the hopelessness and determination of young Somalis.
“I became really interested in Somali piracy in 2008,” he says. “I was just fascinated with this topic in a way I had never really been interested in anything in my life before. Originally, I had been thinking of kind of doing something like ‘Traffic’ or ‘The Wire,’ where you saw every angle of the story. … But the thing I kept coming back to was the pirates. That was really the storyline that I really was most fascinated by. Who would do this and why would they do it? And, kind of, what would the inner workings of that look like?”
In Fishing Without Nets, there’s no Captain Phillips hero. All of the pirates are very much faceless, nameless characters who get caught up in piracy — what essentially becomes a hopeless attempt to get money.
“I think it’s a collision of two worlds, but I think there is some mutual understanding,” he says. “I think we go into a little bit in the movie — of seeing the main character of Abdi and the hostages, [one of whom is] named Victor. They have a connection.”
Fishing Without Nets is the first fictional story from the online magazine, VICE.