While the animated pirates unleashed by Aardman this week might be of the more swashbuckling and impressively beardy variety, a short film that stirred the sea dogs at Sundance earlier this year took a completely different approach to timber shivering. <em>Fishing Without Nets</em>, a visually stunning 15-minute drama about Somali pirates by the US director Cutter Hodierne, took home the Jury Prize in Short Filmmaking at the festival, praised for creating a "rare, inside point of view that humanises a global story". Shot entirely in and around Mombasa, Kenya, Fishing Without Nets takes the unusual path of looking at piracy through the actual pirates' point of view, telling the fictional story of a father living in poverty who eventually turns to the practice after struggling to support his family. Adding authenticity to his feature, Hodierne cast Somalian refugees living in Kenya for the roles, including the lead. "A lot of the scenes were actually him in his actual life, adjusted for the script," says Hodierne. "We really just tried to utilise the reality of the situation. In a lot of ways, our cast were co-authors of the script in that they told us what was what in terms of how people live their life in Somalia." Hodierne says that many of his cast actually claimed they were former pirates. "Although fact-checking with them was a little tricky, we had a sense that these guys were authentic, and under different circumstances could easily have ended up on a boat out in the Indian Ocean chasing after freighters." In one of the most impressive scenes, a small skiff laden with pirates and weaponry is heading out into the ocean, homing in on its target: a vast freighter. Even with the presence of a couple of cameras, it must have been a disconcerting site for those on board the cargo ship. "What we did was just a bit of movie magic," admits Hodierne. "The boat was actually footage we shot on shore, which we composited into a shot of these guys out at sea." However, when they returned to land, Hodierne found that his cast perhaps looked too real, with a boatload of 10 gun-toting Somalians "scaring the hell" out of those on shore. "Man, does word travel fast. The next day we were hearing from several sources that there were rumours of Somali pirates who came ashore and two white members of Al Shabaab." Eventually, the police were notified and the filmmakers were briefly taken to jail. "At least it showed the guys looked authentic," laughs Hodierne. Hodierne spent three and a half months in Kenya shooting Fishing Without Nets (he was only supposed to go for five weeks, but says he was held up mainly through the bureaucracy of getting the right permits). Despite the difficulties, he hopes to return this summer to turn the short - which was just a "teaser" - into a full-length feature. Animations aside, he's not alone in his focus on pirates, with several other projects underway, including the Tom Hanks-starring adaptation of the real-life hijacking of the <em>Maersk Alabama</em> in 2008, currently being directed by Paul Greengrass. "I feel like it's almost becoming a genre," he says. But with the unique Somalian aspect, as opposed to focusing on a ship's western crew, Hodierne hopes his film will have a special place among the growing library. "We really like to think of this as the <em>City of God</em> of Somali pirate films." Follow <strong>Arts & Life on Twitter</strong> to keep up with all the latest news and events