Even with a happy ending, the story that documentary filmmaker Christen Marquez tells is profoundly sad.
To grow up thinking your mother is too mentally unstable to raise you, to think that it’s better to not even remember her, is an emotional burden no child needs. Marquez knows that all too well.
When Marquez was 8, her mother — a part-Hawaiian kumu hula named Elena — was diagnosed with schizophrenia. She sometimes got violent with Marquez and her two younger brothers. Her father, an architect from Seattle, decided it would be best to move his children there.
The separation left Marquez angry and hurt for 15 years.
"We were raised with the idea that mom was crazy," said Marquez, now 31. "It was hard to deal with that. It was easier to try and forget it and put it behind you. That was my first tendency, to forget that she even exists."
But her Hawaiian middle name wouldn’t allow that.
Whenever Marquez thought about that name — 63 letters steeped in hidden meaning — she thought of her mother, who was the only person to understand what she wrote on her daughter’s birth certificate. Learning its definition became a quest that prompted Marquez to turn her documentary cameras on herself.
The result is "E Haku Inoa: To Weave a Name," a moving film that reunited Marquez with her mother and got at the heart of her Hawaiian name.
The film screened twice at this year’s Hawaii International Film Festival and will get an encore Thursday as part of a special, two-hour presentation of PBS Hawaii’s public affairs show "Insights." (Full disclosure: My wife is a co-producer of "Insights.")
ONCE in Seattle, Marquez was able to bury her feelings the way she did on that first Mother’s Day after moving there, when she didn’t know who should get the card she made at school. She gave it to her grandmother.
But as Marquez grew older — when she went to film school at New York University, when she worked on corporate videos or as a camera assistant on other documentaries — that name called to her subconscious.
Marquez learned that when you give a Hawaiian name, it often includes the hopes of what kind of person the recipient will become — an aspiration to live up to, she said.
"So my name became this focal point for me," Marquez said. "How shameful that I have this beautiful name but I have no idea what it means. It was a big mystery. For me it became a huge symbol of not knowing who I was."
The solution, of course, was to make a documentary, said Marquez, who now lives in Los Angeles and owns a video company, Paradocs Productions.
In 2006 the filmmaker reached out to her mother, who at that point was living on her own on Oahu. She sent a camera and a list of questions with an aunt who had planned a visit. Similar interviews ensued, and she finally found herself interviewing her mother face to face.
From 2009 to 2012, as her camera rolled and she questioned her mother, Marquez’s hurt turned into love as she grew to understand the woman, who is now 63.
"I know she had a difficult period in her life, but I question the diagnosis," Marquez said. "Currently she is fine. She is not violent. She hasn’t been medicated — ever. As I started to get to know her, I was amazed at how clear she was."
Sometimes the interviews and the discoveries bordered on emotional overload. When that happened, Marquez allowed her role as documentary director to distract her. But in the end she found something important.
And though Marquez learned the meaning of her name and discusses it in the film, she doesn’t want to see it in print just yet. That’s why it isn’t here.
"It started out as a journey to learn what my name meant for myself, but it became more about getting to know my mom and healing our relationship," Marquez said. "It’s nice. It’s weird. I have a mom now. I never really had one."
"E Haku Inoa: To Weave a Name" will air at 8 p.m. Thursday on PBS Hawaii. A panel discussion about the film and mental health issues will follow.
AND that’s a wrap …
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Mike Gordon is the Star-Advertiser’s film and television writer. Read his Outtakes Online blog at honolulupulse.com. Reach him at 529-4803 or email mgordon@staradvertiser.com.
