FESTIVAL ROUNDUP



 

Hawaii International Film Festival

Legendary 93-year-old surfer, Doc Ball, featured in Surfing for Life Photo by LeRoy Grannis
Undeniably, the Hawaii International Film Festival’s trump card is Hawaii itself: the islands’ natural scenery is so eye shattering that locals and visitors alike feel obliged to wear the loudest Hawaiian shirts in order to compete with the landscape’s color and abundance. The setting of the Festival has a way of confronting even the most single-minded of filmmakers and critics with difficult decisions like whether to watch the legendary surf on Oahu’s North shore, or leave the lure of the landscape and the cocktails to go to a screening of one of the over 100 shorts and features "from the Pacific Rim and beyond" featured in the Festival.

Another unique facet of the HIFF is the judging of the 12 films in competition for the Fest’s Golden Maile Awards. They are assessed not only on the technique and artistry of their filmmaking, but also on their ability to promote cross-cultural understanding. This focus on cross-cultural exchange, in addition to the perfect weather, is what provides the relaxed atmosphere in which filmmakers from India greet Australian counterparts like old friends, and everyone mills around waiting for the next pupu platter to come by or the next cocktail venue to be announced.

The HIFF also has an educational bent, hosting more than 10 seminars in addition to the usual post-screening Q&A sessions. This emphasis on exchange, whether educational or cross-cultural, is part of what brings out local audiences in droves. The other crucial ingredient is, of course, star-studded local premieres of long anticipated art-house blockbusters like the Fest’s opening film, Scott Hicks’ Snow Falling on Cedars. Both because the HIFF doesn’t seem to be a major feeding frenzy for distributors and because of its timing in early November, the Fest functions either as a rollicking finale to a filmmaker’s year of making the festival rounds or as a stepping stone to generate enough buzz to be selected for next year’s festival circuit.

The pomp and circumstance of the Festival awards ceremony, complete with traditional songs and hulas, was interrupted by cinematographer/director Christopher Doyle, who is clearly involved in a secret competition with Roberto Benigni for the hammiest performance at a film festival. Doyle broke into Kodak executive D. Brian Spruill’s list of Doyle’s own merits during the presentation of the Eastman Kodak Award for Excellence in Cinematography to complain about Spruill’s hyperbole, and later carried on a continuing repartee with master of ceremonies Paul Theroux occasionally shouting his personal mantra, "Beer is Life!" from the audience. Meanwhile, Golden Mailes were garnered by the Aussie black comedy Siam Sunset and the beautifully shot U.S. documentary Surfing for Life.

In addition to providing the live entertainment at the awards ceremony, Doyle also provided the pick of the Festival litter with his directorial debut, Away With Words, an anti-narrative stream of consciousness rant on the color blue, the elusivity of memory and, of course, the joys of drinking. Other Fest highlights unlikely to get a major U.S. release include: Rainbow Trout, a lushly photographed Korean spin on Deliverance in which the true enemy is the self stripped to its bare impulses, and Chen Guo-fu’s elegantly innovative The Personals, in which a Taipei woman interviews a series of squirming respondents to her personal ad in the restaurant where she met her lost love. The other pleasures of the Hawaii International Film Festival were best summed up by British-born, L.A.-based filmmaker Ash (director of Bang), who arrived at a late screening of his film Pups in time to gush at the audience, "I just spent the day on the North shore and you guys really do live in fucking paradise!"



 
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© 2005 Filmmaker Magazine