Fishing Without Nets

2014 • 110 minutes

About this movie

Shot in East Africa using Somali non-actors, Fishing Without Nets tells the mesmerizing and sobering story of the bandits from the Somali point of view. First-time feature filmmaker Cutter Hodierne combines the epic cinematic vision of a glorious action-thriller with intimate, textured qualities of an art film, humanizing the pirates by bringing us inside their moral dilemmas and gut-wrenching struggles.

Ratings and reviews

I was there. I worked the issue of East Africa piracy for a year. First of all, the seas off the coast of East Africa have not been over fished. There are many studies that disprove this assertion and this has been used to excuse piracy. The fact is that there's simply more money to be made in pirating than in fishing. Second, the hostages are treated brutally, tortured, starved, used as human shields, and some were killed all because their ransom demands weren't meet. Just read any of the accounts from the survivors. This movie is pure fiction. The title itself tells the entire story, which the movie really didn't go into, and this became almost a joke because of how many times this conversation happened. When caught, the pirates say "we're just out here fishing", but they don't have an answer when then asked "How could you be fishing when you don't have any nets but you have plenty of AK-47s and RPGs?".

Typical Western sensationalist movie about Somalia. As a Somali person who actually lived in Somalia for quite some time I find this movie to be highly inaccurate. It is unrealistic and does not show the real perspective of the actual pirates. Also, many of the chosen actors are Bantus! A lot of them are not even Somali and do not look anything like the real ethnic Somalis who live in Puntland!

Imagine how short of a movie this would be if the crew, or a security detail, were armed. " PIRATES!" Bang! Bang! "Never mind....what's for dinner?"