The Louis Vuitton Hawaii International Film Festival (Oct. 9-19) prides itself on being a bridge between “East and West,” but this year’s edition found its greatest strength in films even closer to home (or as close to home as Hawaii can get, considering it’s the most geographically isolated populated landmass in the world). Festival programmer Anderson Le and director Chuck Boller brought in the usual dizzying array of films and filmmakers from around the Pacific Rim, with Chinese melodramas, Japanese comedies, and Korean thrillers among the many choices on offer this year, but also spotlighted low-budget works from Hawaii and other Pacific Islands, including the first feature films ever from Guam and the Marshall Islands. No longer content to be a mere “bridge” between East and West, this year’s festival promised to highlight the Pacific Islands as a creative locale in its own right.
Don and Kel Muna’s
Shiro’s Head (pictured above), from Guam, and Aaron Condon and Mike Cruz’s
Morning Comes So Soon, from the Marshall Islands, represent the tip of this new Pacific wave. Both films were born more from love and desire than any concrete system; with neither Guam nor the Marshall Islands having a film industry, these filmmakers made not only the films, but the entire support structure, themselves. Brothers Don and Kel Muna gained their education in Southern California film schools and honed their film skills with Northern California wedding videos before returning to Guam to make
Shiro’s Head, a gang-tinged family drama with an intriguing rhythm all its own. Schoolteachers Aaron Condon and Mike Cruz joined forces with Marshallese youth nonprofit organizations to create
Morning Comes So Soon, a Romeo-and-Juliet love story set among indigenous Marshallese and recent Chinese immigrants. Made in American territories located as near to Asia as to the U.S. mainland, both films merge American-indie tropes and character structure with the aesthetic freedom and experimental ethos of new work from the Philippines and China, creating a blend that’s truly (to echo the festival’s claim) a bridge between East and West.
A world-weary thug with soulful eyes and cheekbones so sharp they could cut glass stares aggressively into the camera; directly addressing the audience with a declaration of vengeance and death (delivered in the native Chamorro language), he then flicks a lit cigarette at the lens as the image suddenly, breathlessly freezes: This is the dramatic opening scene of
Shiro’s Head, and a declaration of intent that this is no by-the-numbers film. A young man returns to the island to find himself an outsider in his own realm, trying to make sense of a family mystery, a love triangle and a criminal enterprise, all while deflecting the antagonism of various threatening locals, including a seething Mohawked punk. The plot could be borrowed from countless other genre films, but the Munas filter it through a distinctly Guamian landscape and culture; even the simple fact that it’s delivered partly in Chamorro, a language whose use is declining even in Guam, serves as a form of cultural resistance. (A quick prowl through IMDb, in fact, lists
Shiro’s Head as the only film ever made in Chamorro.) The Guam of
Shiro’s Head is no tropical dreamland of palm trees and sun-kissed beaches, but rather a nightmare of weed-cracked asphalt sidewalks, concrete shacks, and moody machos with trouble in mind, constantly lingering uneasily on the periphery. It’s a landscape that’s normally erased from all images of the region, but for
Shiro’s Head it’s the only one that matters, and the Munas fill it with legends, mysteries and ciphers. This is filmmaking designed not only to tell stories, but to preserve them, and to even preserve the language that tells them. The Munas’s commitment to capturing local life and flavor isn’t just in front of the camera, either; they recruited a host of local musicians to lend songs to the film’s diverse soundtrack and organized their friends and neighbors for cast, crew and support.
Morning Comes So Soon boasts its own commitment to place and culture, in this case the Marshall Islands, a Micronesian nation of multiple islands and U.S. territory. Working with local high school youth (and sponsored by a U.N.E.S.C.O. grant), directors Aaron Condon and Mike Cruz mold a familiar Romeo-and-Juliet plot onto the area’s simmering cultural tensions and contemporary problems. An easy-going local boy (the appealing James Bing III, plucked from an area high school) falls for a young Chinese teen (Ting-Yu Lin, also from a local high school), who works in her mother’s convenience store, but soon trouble emerges from both the boy’s racist friends and the girl’s suspicious family.
Using a teenage love affair for the structure,
Morning tackles not only the island’s current political issues of racial unrest, unemployment and economic collapse, but also more psychological issues like depression and family communication. Part island tragedy and part youth documentary,
Morning also succeeds as a portrait of teenage life on the Marshall Islands with its everyday rhythms and ordinary sights, while its spoken dialogue of Marshallese, English slang and Chinese serves as a virtual mirror to the area’s polyglot nature. There’s a quiet, serene rhythm to many of the shots, but a just-as-present lingering tension; it may be “paradise,” but something’s not quite right. A scene on a beach underneath a hanging palm serves as the only concession to tropical beauty, but even that setting soon turns into something far more tragic. Instead we have a setting more inner-city than outer-island, of convenience stores and basketball courts, low-ceilinged windowless rooms and stuffy schoolrooms, and of young teens stuck with seemingly nowhere to go.
Evidently it spoke to the local community:
Morning was originally to be screened once or twice in a local theater, but it was held over and screened multiple times a day after outdrawing its Hollywood competition and fostered renewed discussions on racism, depression and community relations on the island.
The festival found further success even closer to home in the form of the Audience Award-winning
Chief, a gorgeously shot mini epic from director Brett Wagner that, in only twenty-something minutes, created a perfectly realized, psychological Polynesian noir, filmed under Oahu’s blinding sun yet as dark as any nocturnal thriller, and with a hard-boiled performance by Chief Sielu Avea that would make even Robert Mitchum take note. The Best Documentary winner was another Hawaiian labor of love, Anna Keala Kelly’s
Noho Hewa: The Wrongful Occupation of Hawaii, which detailed in straightforward, passionate detail the impact of militarism and tourism on native Hawaiians, and the Hawaiians’ continuing fight for their land and rights.
It’s been hard for the festival to toe that line between serious artistic venue and easy-going vacation destination (its official Web site interviews of filmmakers include queries like, “What kind of sunscreen do you prefer?”). Visiting filmmakers, critics and programmers find a schedule that makes it simple to do both; most screenings start in the late afternoon, leaving plenty of time beforehand to sample the island’s non-theatrical pleasures, while most films are done by midnight or so, leaving plenty of time to, um, sample the island’s non-theatrical pleasures. The festival’s always been known for its spotlight on emerging Asian filmmakers and Asian genre works; this year’s focus on Hawaiian and Pacific Island films, however, may turn HIFF into not only an “aloha” destination, but a place of discovery as well.
Labels: Festivals
# posted by Webmaster @ 1/05/2009 03:01:00 PM
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