CUTTER HODIERNE is an award winning film director best known for winning the Directing Award at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival for his debut feature film FISHING WITHOUT NETS, a story of pirates in Somalia told from the perspective of the pirates.
Fishing Without Nets is based on a short film of the same title, which won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival and was expanded into the first scripted feature film produced and financed by VICE. Cutter workshopped the film's script at the Sundance Screenwriter's Lab, before shooting the Somali language epic on location in East Africa with a cast of Somali actors, on speedboats and oil tankers in the Indian Ocean and is based on true stories and the lives of the cast members. The film garnered many awards and accolades and was released worldwide by VICE and 20th Century Fox.
Cutter has recently designed a VR exhibit at the Newseum in Washington, DC, in which he turned one of their physical exhibitions of the Berlin Wall into a VR experience.
Just before Cutter was born, his parents sold everything they owned, quit their jobs, and bought a 32-foot cutter-rigged sailboat. Cutter is named after this boat, Cutter is his real name. He spent his early years in the South Pacific Ocean and Japan, eventually growing up in Washington, DC where he got his start making short films and music videos for local artists such as Chuck Brown. At age 22, he was hired to document U2 on their historic '360-Tour' in Europe and North America. He took his earnings from the tour to Africa to make the short version of Fishing Without Nets.