Arlington County Board Chair Jay Fisette will be a speaker this Thursday at the showing of a film that examines the impact that plastic bags and other plastic products have on the environment.

The film, called “Bag It: Is Your Life Too Plastic?” will be presented at Arlington Cinema & Drafthouse (2903 Columbia Pike) this Thursday at 7:00 p.m. The event is hosted by Tap In Arlington, a grassroots organization campaigning against single-use plastic water bottles.

Fisette launched a “personal crusade” against plastic bottles last year, is a supporter of Tap In and debated a bottled water industry executive in January. Fisette will speak alongside the film’s director and star, Jeb Berrier.

In promotional material, the film is described as “touching and often flat-out-funny” and Berrier is said to be an “everyman… who is admittedly not a tree hugger.”

Tickets for the event are $10 at the door, or $5 for students and seniors.

(Updated at 5:30 p.m.) Cutter Hodierne, a 27-year-old Arlington native and H-B Woodlawn graduate, won the Directing Award for drama at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

Hodierne’s feature film, Fishing Without Nets, is the full-length version of his 2011 short film of the same name, which won Sundance’s Jury Prize in Short Filmmaking at the 2012 festival.

Fishing Without Nets tells the story of a young Somali father who is forced to become a pirate to support his family. The film was shot in Kenya, mostly on the Indian Ocean, and features nonactors playing the role of the pirates. Hodierne, in an interview he gave for Sundance’s website, called the film “action arthouse.”

“I wanted to make a movie that was as realistic as possible, but to also maintain kind of a grand and cinematic quality,” he said. “You could see how tempting it could be to kind of be steered toward this life. It’s obviously a huge risk and a dangerous world to get into, but when your options are so limited it becomes a more hopeful possibility.”

Hodierne graduated from H-B Woodlawn and attended film school at Emerson College in Boston before dropping out after one year, according to his mother, Alicia Shepard. Hodierne said he dropped out because “I’ve already learned all this stuff” — thanks to David Burkman, his teacher at H-B Woodlawn. Burkman is credited as a writer on Fishing With Nets. Also helping out on the film was Raphael Swann, another H-B Woodlawn grad, who was credited as a co-producer.

“[Cutter has] known what he wanted to do since he was 16, maybe even earlier, and he’s done it,” Shepard told ARLnow.com this week. “It was clear he had a talent for this in high school… He has a lucky blend of being an artist and entrepreneur. It’s not enough to just be an artist. He’s a bit of hustler, in a good sense.”

Shepard said she was intimately involved with the short film two years ago, but for the feature film, Hodierne insisted she wait until the premiere to see the final product.

“I was blown away by how ambitious the film is, how beautifully shot it is,” she said. “I have no real credibility as his mother, it was just mind-blowing to see what your child can produce. You know your kid is fairly talented, but wow. And to get the validation as best director. It was emotionally overwhelming for me, I can only imagine it was for him.”

Screenshot (top) via Sundance.org. Image (bottom) courtesy Cutter Holdierne

Washington, D.C., likes to call itself the most powerful city in the world, but films based in D.C. have a knack for missing some basic information that would make locals chuckle. Those omissions made for a lively talk at the Arlington Central Library on Monday afternoon.

Author Mike Canning released the book “Hollywood on the Potomac” last year. It’s a comprehensive guide to how the film industry has treated D.C. as a subject, character and background since the time when moving pictures with sound were called “talkies.”

During his talk on Monday, Canning showed clips from several films that are based in D.C., from Frank Capra and Jimmy Stewart’s “Mr. Smith Goes To Washington” to Leonardo DiCaprio’s “J. Edgar.”

No film crew has ever been allowed to shoot inside the Senate or the House of Representatives, Canning said, but the closest approximation came in “Mr. Smith,” for which Capra and his crew spent days in the Senate building, taking measurements and photos of the hall.

“It took $100,000 and six months to build,” Canning said of the 1939 film’s iconic set. It’s still the finest approximation of Congress in a movie, Canning said.

He compared it to 2000’s “The Contender,” in which Jeff Bridges, who plays the president, calls a joint session of Congress in a scene filmed in Richmond’s General Assembly building.

The biggest “goof,” as Canning calls them, in a D.C. movie came in 1987’s “No Way Out.” Kevin Costner, playing a Naval officer, is running away from two men in suits. He jumps off the Whitehurst Freeway and finds himself running along the C&O canal in the heart of Georgetown, when he takes an abrupt left turn and enters a Metro stop. The nearly 100 people in the audience burst out laughing watching a film so gravely misrepresent the area’s public transit system.

Despite the Metro stop mistake, Canning insists the rest of the film is worth watching. Arlington residents may get a kick out of the opening scene, which pans out from the Pentagon and shows Pentagon City as it was in the mid-1980s: small houses surrounded by forest.

GOP May Skip November Board Race — With a presidential election likely to bring Democrats out to the polls in droves, Republicans are saying, privately, that it’s likely they will not be running a candidate for County Board in November. Republican Mark Kelly received 43.5 percent of the vote to Democrat Libby Garvey’s 49.2 percent in yesterday’s historically low turnout special election. [Sun Gazette]

D.C. Premiere of H-B Grad’s Film Planned — Fresh off a big win at the Sundance Film Festival, “Fishing Without Nets” will be holding its Washington, D.C. premiere next month. The short film, created by H-B Woodlawn grad Cutter Hodierne, will be premiering at a “surprise location” on Saturday, April 21. Tickets are $15. [Eventbrite]

Sun Gazette Sold to Texas Company — The weekly Sun Gazette newspaper has been sold to HPR Hemlock LLC, a newspaper investment firm out of Fort Worth, Texas. A company executive says the Sun Gazette and its sister publication, Leesburg Today, will retain autonomy at the local level. The Sun Gazette had previously been owned by another Texas company, American Community Newspapers LLC, which declared bankruptcy in 2009. [Sun Gazette]

H-B Woodlawn grad Cutter Hodierne has emerged the big winner in the short film category at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival.

Out of more than 7,500 submissions and some 64 short films screened at the festival, Hodierne’s Fishing Without Nets has earned the top jury prize for Short Filmmaking. The jury, which included Beavis and Butthead creator Mike Judge, said Fishing Without Nets provided a unique perspective on the issue of Somali piracy.

“By approaching a story of epic scope with an intimate perspective, this visually stunning film creates a rare, inside point of view that humanizes a global story,” the jury said. The jury award was announced last night. Hodierne will be formally honored at Sundance’s Awards Ceremony, hosted by actress Parker Posey, on Sunday.

Fishing Without Nets was written, directed, produced and edited by Hodierne. Filmed in Kenya, the 17-minutes film is a fictional story about Somali pirates, told from the perspective of the pirates.

Hodierne is now working on a feature-length version of the film.

When Cutter Hodierne got the call, at 11:00 p.m. on the day before Thanksgiving, he assumed it was a prank.

The voice on the other end congratulated him for his short film, Fishing Without Nets, being selected to the Sundance Film Festival, one of the most prestigious film festivals in the world. After the caller repeatedly assured Hodierne that he wasn’t being pranked — “that’s what everybody I call says” — the realization set in: this 24-year-old H-B Woodlawn grad and college dropout was mere weeks away from presenting his film at the festival that had helped the careers of indie film icons like Kevin Smith, Robert Rodriguez, Quentin Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson and Steven Soderbergh.

“This is just a big dream since I picked up a camera for the first time,” said Hodierne, 24, in a phone interview.

Fishing Without Nets was written, directed, produced and edited by Hodierne. It is a fictional story about Somali pirates, told from the perspective of the pirates. Filmed in Kenya, utilizing amateur Somali actors, the short is a testament to Hodierne’s perseverance and resourcefulness.

Together with producing partners Raphael Swann (another H-B Woodlawn grad), John Hibey (also a co-writer), Harold Otieno and Abubakr Mire, Hodierne managed to overcome challenge after challenge over the course of three months to complete the filming of the 17-minute film.

First, there was the casting of the film. Mire, who Hodierne described as a one-man Kenyan talent agency, helped to round up a bunch of Somali immigrants for auditions in a nightclub.

“Most of the guys cast as pirates were just local Somali guys living in Kenya who looked the part,” Hodierne said.

Then there was the matter of obtaining guns from the police for the filming. The Kenyan government, which has strict gun laws on its books, was not easily persuaded that Hodierne and his small crew were trustworthy enough to be given (real) automatic weapons.

“People are very suspicious of anybody trying to rent a bunch of guns from the police,” he said with a laugh. Eventually, Hodierne got his way — and his guns.

Then Hodierne found himself in a real-life life-and-death situation. He and his producing partners were robbed at gunpoint by a group of men. After giving the armed men everything they had, Hodierne and company were marched out to the ocean.

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