A still from the short film - Fishing Without Nets, Directed by Cutter Hodierne Courtesy of Sundance Film Festival -

Filmed in Kenya, East Africa, Cutter Hodierne’s 17 minute short ‘Fishing Without Nets’ is a story about Somali pirates.  After being noticed for his self-made short videos Cutter Hodierne dropped out of college in Boston and decided to take a plunge into film-making. With a bit of luck at the age of 22 he was touring the world with U2 as their filmmaker.

With a savvy sense for cultivating his own persona, the director claims his parents sold their possessions just before he was born, quit their jobs and bought a 32‐foot cutter-rigged sailboat from which he was christened Cutter. It was smooth sailing for the next three years of his life at least, around the South Pacific, which might have given him a pirate’s eye for roving and adventure.

A still from the short film - Fishing Without Nets, Directed by Cutter Hodierne

Though not all his upbringing was as exotic, having been raised in Virginia with a mother at NPR, he had enough of a regular education to get a good feel for digital video editing at an early age. Recently his efforts have paid off, and now at 25 years of age, he’s been fortunate to have his short film accepted into Sundance. His film ‘Fishing Without Nets’ is the story of pirates in Somalia, told from the perspective of the pirates. Though the script is fiction, the film has the feel of a documentary, and ripe for the recent interest in renegade pirates of the high seas.

Hodierne along with some of his school-mates took a gambit and flew to Kenya to shoot the film on a shoestring, recruiting his actors from the streets of Mombasa. Shooting the film in Kenya had been tough and the crew even had a run in with the law due to the stringent gun permit laws. With a bit more pirate charm, Hodierne hopes to finish his short in South Africa and turn it eventually into a feature film.

Native - Courtesy of Cutter Hodierne - http://www.mynameiscutter.com

View the Trailer: somalipiratemovie.com
Filmed in Kenya, East Africa, the 17 minute short ‘Fishing Without Nets’ is playing at Sundance Film Festival 2012
DIRECTOR Cutter Hodierne
SCREENWRITER Cutter Hodierne, John Hibey
Kenya, 2011, 17 min, color,
Somalian with English subtitles

http://www.mynameiscutter.com/

Detropia, DIRECTOR Heidi Ewing, Rachel Grady U.S.A., 2011, 90 min, color

From the scores of films shown at this year’s Sundance Film Festival (January 19-29, 2012 in Park City, Utah), only a few end up getting wider distribution; the rest recede into obscurity in Indie film houses. A few of the interesting art films worth looking out for are singled out here:

Directed by New York-based documentary filmmakers Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, Detropia – describes Detroit’s boom and bust history; the hemorrhaging decay and eventual collapse of its auto industry. “With its vivid, painterly palette and haunting score, DETROPIA sculpts a dreamlike collage of a grand city teetering on the brink of dissolution.” The film documents buildings being demolished as Detroit’s economic prospects fade, wages plummet and tourists ogle at the “charming decay.”

THE CLOUD OF UNKNOWING, DIRECTOR Ho Tzu Nyen Singapore, 30 min, color

Ho Tzu Nyen’s, The Cloud of Unknowing is an art installation and film, originally shown at the 54th Venice Biennale as part of the Singapore pavillion. The video and sound installation examines clouds as symbolizing transience and emptiness. “On a screen, a narrative unfolds, set in a public housing complex in Singapore, where eight characters in eight apartments individually encounter a cloud, embodied both as a figure and a vaporous mist.”

Excision, DIRECTOR Richard Bates Jr. SCREENWRITER Richard Bates Jr. U.S.A., 2011, 81 min, color

Excision, DIRECTOR Richard Bates Jr. SCREENWRITER Richard Bates Jr. U.S.A., 2011, 81 min, color

Denis Côté's Bestiaire DIRECTOR Denis Côté Canada/France, 2011, 72 min, color

Bestiaries were compendiums of exotic beasts that were popular in medieval times. Denis Côté’s Bestiaire depicts buffalo, hyenas, zookeepers, zebras, taxidermists, rhinos, and ostriches within beautifully composed frames of a locked-off camera. “Whether we anthropomorphize, poeticize, abstract, or judge them is up to us. Côté invites his audience to reflect on control and power as lions rattle cages, a taxidermist recreates a duck, and artists copy a stuffed deer. Using the film form to challenge the very notion of representation, Bestiaire is an elegant, bewitching meditation on the nature of sentience and the boundaries between nature and civilization.”

Other notable films include, Slow Derek, directed by Dan Ojari “The tale of Derek, an office worker, as he struggles with the true speed of planet Earth;” Marina Abramović’s The Artist is Present, and Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace’s Shut Up and Play the Hits, a concert film on LCD Soundsystem.

Click here for more details:
DETROPIA
CLOUD OF UNKNOWING
EXCISION