When he and Hibey, a Georgetown Prep alum who lives by U Street, left for Kenya in October 2010, they'd planned to spend five weeks there. Upon arrival, they found fixers to help with casting sessions and location scouting. Three weeks in, Swann joined them on vacation from his job at William Morris, in L.A. Soon thereafter, says Hodierne, "it starts to become clear that the prop guns that we need are not going to be easy to come by. We all made the assumption, 'Oh, it's Africa, we’ll be able to get guns.' But rest assured, it's a lot easier to get guns in the U.S. — especially Virginia — than it is in Kenya.”

   

    

Guns N' Poses: Cutter Hodierne. (Photo: John Hibey)

That is, the crew wanted to use real AK-47s and RPGs, which required approval from the police. That's when "the cards came falling down," as Hodierne puts it. Only in Nairobi could such approval be obtained, and once there, they had to wait a week for a meeting with the necessary authority. They got the meeting, and then had to wait again for another meeting. "Meanwhile," he says, "I'm just hemorrhaging money." Eventually they got the approval, and only needed to sign some paperwork. Swann flew back to the U.S., thinking everything was in order. "That's when we arrive at the police station and a riot has broken out in the country, and the police — this is the last thing they want to help us with,” Hodierne says. "It was just one constant obstacle after another like that. "It ended up taking three and a half months before we came home.”

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Of that time, only two weeks were spent filming — and that time wasn't cheap, too. "Everybody who worked on the film got paid,” Hodierne says. "You can do an indie film in America, and people work for free. The one thing people in Africa aren't going to do is work for free, in any capacity, because you're just seen as a floating bag of money.” As a result, Hodierne spent "a lot" of his U2 earnings, but he was rewarded when his short was accepted into Sundance and, earlier this week, it won the Jury Prize in Short Filmmaking, which includes a $5,000 check.

Needless to say, the crew was never shot that night when they were handcuffed on the beach. Hibey complained that his cuffs hurt, and one of the men took them off, just like that. A $150 bribe later, they were all free. Little did they know that the following weeks would be, in Hodierne's words, "the most difficult thing I've ever done in my life." And yet, he plans to do it again, as he's always envisioned Fishing Without Nets as a feature-length film. "In a weird way," he says, "hopefully, all things going well, we’ll be back there, making a longer version.”

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