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Flowers and Songs: The Hawai’i International Film Festival (HIFF) At 44
Standing Above the Clouds Hometown premieres of several long-anticipated local films galvanized this year’s edition of the Hawai’i International Film Festival (HIFF), now in its 44th year. Last year, fewer films debuted due to pandemic shooting delays; “just wait until 2024” was the common refrain. But now, 2024 is here, and those awaited works have finally arrived. Showcasing the rising talents of the region’s film scene and its sheer diversity of topics and genres, films played to not only sold-out houses, but often to two or three sold-out houses simultaneously—the festival had to keep adding screenings to keep up with demand. HIFF’s decision to take over all the screens of its Consolidated Theaters Kahala venue proved invaluable, both for accommodating audience fervor and generating crackling energy each evening; it makes a difference when everyone is there to experience a festival—not just some, while the rest are there for the Marvel movie in the next auditorium.
Supplementing the local works was HIFF’s typically unique blend of East Asian commercial and arthouse fare, Pasifika narratives and documentaries, and an ever-expanding focus on television narratives, including screenings and panels lead by Shogun showrunners (and recent Emmy Award-winners) Rachel Kondo and Justin Marks, and a sneak preview of Hulu’s Taika Waititi-helmed pilot for the new series Interior Chinatown, with appearances by creator Charles Yu and stars Jimmy O. Yang, Ronny Chieng and Chloe Bennet. Awards to famed documentary filmmaker/producer Stanley Nelson of Firelight Media (The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, San Juan Hill, Manhattan’s Lost Neighborhood) and Hong Kong actress/producer Sandra Ng (Golden Chicken, Love Lies), along with public talks by legendary cinematographer Roger Deakins (Blade Runner 2049), displayed the festival’s wide range, while three titles from Aotearoa, New Zealand demonstrated the continuing connections between the film community there and in Hawai’i. (Roughly twenty-plus years after her time teaching on the island, many Native Hawaiian filmmakers still speak with reverence of Māori New Zealand indigenous activist/theorist/filmmaker Merata Mita and her impact on their development and practice).
Tinã, Miki Magasiva’s powerful drama on a Samoan community leader coming to terms with her daughter’s death, was given the Opening Night slot, while Josephine Stewart-Tewhiu’s story of courage and rebellion within an isolated girl’s institution, We Were Dangerous, earned the festival’s Pasifika Award, along with a $5,000 cash prize. Dramatizing a key battle, the Siege of Ōrākau, during the 1864 New Zealand Wars between colonial forces and Māori communities, Mike Jonathan’s coming-of-age war epic Ka Whawhai Tonu: Struggle Without End received a NETPAC Honorable Mention. Jonathan’s decision to re-imagine the battle through the eyes of two teenage outsiders—a half-Māori, half-European prisoner-of-war, and a young girl who serves as the community’s spirit medium—adds warmth and grace to what could have been a brutal war tale, while its economy of scale gives the illusion of a much larger budget. Attendees so appreciated this retelling of indigenous heroism, recognizing in this Māori tale the spirit and struggle of their Native Hawaiian history, that several audience members stood up at one Q&A to welcome Jonathan and producer Piripiri Curtis with a traditional Hawaiian chant.
In its recreation of a moment in indigenous Pasifika history, and its insistence that it be told in the original indigenous language, Ka Whawhai Tonu functioned as a kindred-spirit big-brother to one of the more exciting local debuts, Gerard Elmore and Mitchel Merrick’s independent short Kūkini. A historical action-epic set in 1790 Hawai’i, and based on an original concept by popular Hawaiian singer/performer Paula Fuga, Kūkini rolls in at just under 27 minutes, yet lays down a template for how to not only shoot and make a successful action film on a shoestring budget, but do it with care and respect towards indigenous traditions. It squeezes in fast-moving, skillfully shot combat and battle scenes with rigorous attention to cultural specificity and accuracy, down to adjusting its actors’ modern-day tattoos so they would be period-appropriate. Done as a labor of love by producer/cinematographer Elmore and director Merrick, Kūkini also benefited from the contributions of much of the island’s movie-making community. “For a film with a scope like this, a lot of it is convincing the community to rally behind it,” shares Elmore. “We were able to get the best of the best to contribute.”
The film’s somewhat awkward running time may have hindered its festival appearances elsewhere (too short for a feature slot, too long to fit into a traditional shorts program), but, says Merrick, “I believe it’s a testament to what we are willing to do here in Hawai‘i to tell our stories the right way. Kūkini shows that we aren’t far off from being able to pull off a feature of this scale with a fully local cast and crew.” More importantly, “locals have been emotional and thanked us for telling a story that represented them,” says Elmore. “People have told me they felt seen and wished movies like these existed when they grew up.” (Read more about the film, its backstory and making films in Hawai’i in my interview with Elmore and Merrick.)
A similarly anticipated title was the hometown debut of Alika Tengan’s Molokai’i Bound, a feature-length version of his award-winning short of the same name. A slow-burning character study of a Native Hawaiian just released from prison, struggling to reconnect with both his young pre-teen son and his own indigenous identity, the film stands out for staying true to its unflashy, working-class milieu, and for its refusal of typical narrative flourishes or quirks. Its characters don’t inhabit a world where phrases like “navigating indigenous identity,” “toxic masculinity” or “the traumas of colonialization” are said aloud, even if those things are subtly (and not so subtly) affecting those characters. Instead, our hero simply tries to muddle through like everyone else—often failing, sometimes succeeding, but always trying to do better, beautifully captured by cinematographer Chapin Hall. The film won both the festival’s Made in Hawai’i Best Narrative Feature Award, and its Kau Ka Hōkū (or Rising Star) Award. (Read more about Molokai’i Bound in my interview with Alika Tengan here).
A key visual motif are the constant glimpses of the Ko’olau mountain range surrounding the town of Kane’ohe, where the film is set. Looming over the characters, the starkly gorgeous mountains function as a reminder of the power of their surroundings and ancestral land, but also as a prison hemming in those too stubborn to move forward. For our hero, too exhausted to scale the peaks, the only escape is towards the sea and the island of Molokai’i, a symbol of an idyllic childhood (and of an unspoiled Native Hawaiian ideal) with some of the highest sea cliffs in the world.
Mountains form the backbone of another key festival title in Jalena Keane-Lee’s documentary Standing Above the Clouds. Like Molokai’i Bound, it’s a feature-length version of an earlier short of the same name, in this case following the movement that formed to protect the sacred Mauna Kea mountain from the construction of the Thirty Mile Telescope. While the 2020 short revolved around events on the mountain and key “protectors” of the Mauna, the feature focuses on three women-led families and their struggles and victories not only “on the Mauna” but off of it, especially during the long years of COVID and pandemic isolation that followed. “Stories of powerful women and daughters are usually only kept through oral traditions, but I wanted to use the medium of film to capture it,” noted Keane-Lee at the festival. Here, activism is seen as not just mass gatherings and public protests, but also the very private moments at home alone, in a car with a colleague or at a gathering with family. It’s shown not just as microphone- or megaphone-amplified speeches and slogans chanted to hundreds, but successes and loves, secrets and doubts, quietly passed from mother to daughter, friend to friend.
Standing Above the Clouds also benefits from the charisma, storytelling flair and generous intellect of Pua Case, a Native Hawaiian cultural practitioner and teacher and one of the leaders of the movement. “Wwhen they first approached us years ago, it was really about approaching me and saying ‘Could we follow you on the Mauna?’” she shared at the festival screening. “I said, ‘Absolutely not,’ but ‘absolutely not’ because I didn’t want it to be about our family. We wanted it to be about all the families, inclusive of others, of everyone involved in all aspects of the front line. We always said, ‘This is your film, but this is our life.’” Named a USA Today ‘Woman of the Year” for her role in the Mauna Kea movement, Case was on hand for the screenings, going so far as to walk up and down every row of the theate, to personally thank each audience member for coming. After an audience member asked about the chants to the Mauna heard in the film, she led the theater in an impromptu, powerfully moving rendition, providing HIFF with another moment where film, activism and culture fused together.
Winner of HIFF’s Made in Hawai’i Best Short Film Award, which qualifies it for Oscar contention, Ciara Leina’ala Lacy’s animated short The Queen’s Flowers offers a different kind of inter-generational connection between strong-willed females in the fantasy genre. Beautifully animated by Daniel Sousa (who’s also done the visuals for two other key films, Aikãne and Kapaemahu) in a dazzling palate of royal and Pua Kalaunu purples and tropical lilikoi yellows, the film illustrates a chance meeting between a young Native Hawaiian girl and an imprisoned Queen Lili’uokalani, the last monarch of Hawai’i who was overthrown by U.S. business interests in 1893. Richly colored, The Queen’s Flowers holds deeper meanings within its frames. “As we began the process of collaborating with Director of Animation Daniel Sousa,” Lacy writes, “I knew I wanted the film to be filled with visual kaona, or layers of meaning. Every scene was not only painstakingly built off of historical reference images, it was also carefully encoded with symbols and gestures rich with meaning in Hawaiian culture.” For Lacy, “a former headstrong little Native Hawaiian girl,” “it is exciting to think of reclaiming authorship of our Native stories for our children, especially for young Indigenous girls.” (For another Hawai’i-based reclamation of a strong-willed heroine, visit my spotlight interview on the Hilo-set narrative feature Chaperone, a complicated tale of a 29-year-old woman and her relationship with a high-school heartthrob, by Zöe Eisenberg.)
One of HIFF’s more rewarding side-bars were two omnibus projects bringing new stories to the screen: Homegrown: A Part of/Apart, produced by Stanley Nelson’s Firelight Media in collaboration with Pacific Islanders in Communications and others, and Nia Tero’s Reciprocity Project Shorts: Elemental Water, Global Indigenous Stories of Return. The former paired eight documentary shorts by emerging BIPOC filmmakers from U.S. territories like Puerto Rico, Guam, the Virgin Islands and American Samoa, as well as Hawai’i, focused on what it means to be both “a part of” and “apart from” the United States. (One of those shorts, Chamoru: A Lost Language, Brian Muna’s deeply personal exploration of the fading of Guam’s indigenous tongue, earned HIFF’s Best Short Film Award.) The latter project brought together shorts by indigenous filmmakers around the world focused on the concept of water. Possibly just as important as the films, HIFF and the creating organizations funded all of those filmmakers to attend the festival together, helping to create new connections, friendships and ideas that may hopefully lead to even more opportunities for these emerging artists.
Possibly the biggest news out of HIFF this year was announced a day or two before the festival began, with news that its own ambitious omnibus project, Makawalu, had finally received full support and funding to begin production in early 2025. Originally announced at the end of the 2021 festival, the Makawalu project is devised as a Native Hawaiian filmmaker development program and feature film, which will anthologize eight shorts taking different looks at the same event, all to be made by Native Hawaiian directors. Makawalu means “eight eyes,” or visions; this first edition will revolve around a typical tourist luau held on the 4th of July. It’s based on a concept developed by the Mãori New Zealand producing duo of Kerry Warkia and Kiel McNaughton, whose works Waru (2016), Vai (2019), and Kainga (2022) used that approach to much acclaim. (Warkia and McNaughton served as advisors for Makawalu’s first retreat in 2021 and continue to mentor). In addition, actor, producer and longtime Hawai’i resident Daniel Dae Kim signed on to executive produce the film.“Makawalu represents an important step in recognizing Native Hawaiian filmmakers and the power of their stories,” noted Kim in a release. “As someone who’s worked with this talented group firsthand, it’s been an honor to be able to amplify their voices and help this project come to life.” As the films of the 2024 festival testified, projects such as Makawalu, and the networks fostered here, ensure that new stories will continue to emerge and be seen.
