★ Audience Choice Award
Best Film — 2025 International Fly Fishing Film Festival
On the flats near Xcalak, a guide reads the water in a language without sound — and sees what no one else can. A story about family, obsession, and a different kind of hero.
“What if we tried a different kind of hero for once?”
Tommy lost his hearing as an infant and grew up on the water where guiding is normally constant and spoken. He built another way — lips, light, movement, instinct. The film calls it eyes like an osprey.
No spoken instruction, no conventional speech. Tommy directs the cast through signs he invented out of necessity, reading the angler and the fish at the same time. What looks like a limitation became one of the most effective ways to find permit on the flat.
Tommy learned the water from his father, Alijandro Batun, a respected flats guide. Their bond is the emotional center of the film. Out here guiding is not employment — it is inheritance, tradition, and a place to belong.
Crabs shelter in the floating weed and ride it to the surface, where permit take them in the open. Tommy and Alijandro answered with a floating pattern of their own — and one of the rarest sights in the sport: an explosive, topwater permit eat.
Audiences kept asking where they could get Tommy’s fly. The film helped carry his floating crab from a local pattern to a collaboration with Umpqua and Fly Fusion. The first limited run sold out — net proceeds went directly to Tommy and his family. A story that gave something back to the person who lived it.
