The Deadpool of Fly Fishing Films

Silent Spotter brings humor, irreverence, and wit to the IF4

A new film from Off the Grid Studios currently playing in the International Fly Fishing Film Festival opens with this question— “Who’s the hero in most fly fishing media?”  

We all know the answer. The narrator tells us the answer, though also in the form of a question, “Bearded bros who smell like hickory and look like they chop wood, but really they only chop Instagram reels?” 

These rhetorical questions nudge the audience away from passively experiencing the film, encouraging them to think about what they’re seeing and hearing. It’s one of three such cinematic devices in the first 15 seconds.  

We open with the standard overhead shot of a saltwater flat. The narrator mutters to himself, as though he doesn’t realize the film has begun, “Ah man, how do these things start? And cue the big, wide establishing drone shot. Ooh, look at that. Beautiful.”  

It’s got strong Deadpool vibes, only instead of a superhero flick, we’re watching a fly fishing film. The next line, “Oh, hi fishing buddies!” shatters the fourth wall, speaking directly to the audience. 

Silent Spotter offers something for everybody. If you want to get all cinematic/literary, it's a self-referential commentary on the fly fishing film genre and fly fishing media. If you just want entertainment, sit back and enjoy 17 minutes of piscatorial escapism: Beautiful shots, meticulously edited, transport you to Carribean flats for all the close-up, slow mo action you could want. It invites you to interrogate the construct of fly fishing films while simultaneously giving you everything you love about fly fishing films. 

Such a high-minded concept could be really annoying, if the movie weren’t genuinely funny and ruthlessly self-deprecating.

At its core, Silent Spotter is a film about Tommy Batun, a young, up-and-coming Mayan flats guide from the small coastal community of Xcalak, Mexico. Tommy apprentices with his dad, Alejandro, a legendary flats guide in this area. Xcalak sits right at the Mexico/Belize border, an area synonymous with flats fishing in general and permit in particular.

You might be thinking, “Great, another lodge commercial about a place I’ll never be able to afford to go.” Since the film is narrated by Jesse Colten, the owner of Xflats Lodge in Xcalak, you wouldn’t be entirely wrong, but the film transforms this into another self-referential joke. Colton says, “but this isn’t just another lodge commercial. We’ve all seen enough of those, am I right?” And then whispers conspiratorially, “Go to the Xflats.”

According to RA Beattie, the filmmaker responsible for Silent Spotter, this project did start out as a lodge commercial pitch. “Jesse initially got in touch with us about shooting a permit film. He told us how great the fishing was and how they were dialing in permit on dry flies, getting incredible eats.”

We’ll cover topwater permit in more detail later, but that initial conversation didn’t captivate Beattie.

“That sounded fun; I was pumped to see permit eat off the surface, but there wasn’t a real story, so I kept pushing Jesse. Eventually he told me about Tommy and gave me some of his backstory. I was like, ‘You should have led with this. This is a great story.’ Once we had Tommy in place as the main character, I knew we had a worthwhile film.”

Previous exceptional films like Cosmo and Running Shallow set the bar for profiling guides from destination fisheries, but none of those stories are quite like Tommy’s. He is, first and foremost, a fly angler. He’s splashed with permit tattoos and decorates his home with permit art and photos, but he’s also unlike every other guide and angler you know. As Colton explains in the film, “Tommy, like myself and just about every other saltwater fly angler on the planet, is obsessed with permit. But why am I, a gringo from the Rockies telling the story of a young, Mayan fly fishing guide instead of letting Tommy tell you for himself? Because he can’t. Tommy lost his hearing as an infant.”

"My first reaction was, ‘How does that work.’” Beattie said. “Flats fishing is a team sport, and being a good guide requires fast, efficient, accurate communication between client and guide. How does a guide who can neither hear nor speak get his clients into fish?”

You’ll have to watch the film for the full answer to that question, but Tommy does get his clients into fish, lots of them.

“Tommy has incredible vision. He sees things no one else does, including other flats guides. I don’t know if his visual acuity is enhanced because he can’t hear, like one sense gets sharper because another is absent. It seems like he’s able to focus in ways the rest of us can’t.”

Tommy may not be able to hear or speak, but he has no trouble communicating. The relationship between the characters makes this film accessible and powerful. These three men love fishing together, and Silent Spotter captures that camaraderie. “Permit brought Tommy, Alejandro, and me together.” Colton tells the audience. “Our shared interest turned into a friendship and now a brotherhood built on mutual obsession.”

All fly anglers can relate to that, and many films have focused on such relationships. The bonds we form transcend fishing, but few of us can translate that experience across cultures and physical capabilities. This is what makes Silent Spotter stand out; it takes many of our favorite fishing film themes and upends them just enough to feel original, giving us the chance to reconsider what makes those themes so attractive in the first place.

Silent Spotter also plays with the fly fishing conservation film trope. Toward the end, Colton explains that permit surface feeding correlates with the proliferation of Sargassum, a drifting aquatic vegetation that has increased exponentially in the past decade due to nutrient loads and warming ocean temperatures.

“Now, I don’t really want to talk about Sargassum,” Colton says, “because it’s a bummer...It’s hurting the economy; it’s threatening my livelihood and others.” Instead of transitioning to a parade of biologists and other talking heads casting dire predictions if humanity doesn’t change its ways over piano music, the film pivots. “Don’t worry, I’m not Morgan Freeman or Sigourney Weaver. This isn’t another environmental degradation film about how we’re killing the planet and ruining the ocean.”

The implicit message, however, lingers. We are doing all those things, but you’ve already seen versions of that film so many times that you’re probably numb to that messaging. Silent Spotter presents a conservation story without getting bogged down in the depressing framework of a conservation film. After establishing the problem, it returns to Tommy, one of the first guides to realize that permit feed on the crabs that hide in Sargassum blooms and innovate new patterns to imitate these crabs that swim at, or just below, the surface.

Which brings us to the fishing, specifically, the permit on dry flies. “I hate making films about permit, steelhead, or musky,” Beattie said. “Every day you’re filming costs a ton of money, and those fish are never guaranteed. You can spend a week at one of the top permit destinations and still not get the shot you need to make the film work. But this time, it actually did.”

Setting up the final scene Jesse says, “From environmental catastrophe, we bring you, the greatest permit dry fly fishing ever captured on film.” Like a Gen X Simpsons character, you can never tell if Jesse’s being sarcastic or serious, but the following two and a half minutes deliver on his promise. It’s a banquet of gratuitous eats guaranteed to tickle your vicarious fish bone.

In the end, Spotter revisits the question about heroes in fly fishing but avoids offering the neat answer you might expect. We won’t give it away here. You can decide for yourself. Or, you can just enjoy a great fly fishing movie.