Hawaii auteurs are making waves in the movie industry, with Native Hawaiians getting particular attention.
The prestigious Sundance Film Festival this week screened Hawaiian filmmaker Ciara Lacy’s “This Is the Way We Rise,” a short documentary on spoken word artist Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio and her involvement in the Three Meter Telescope protests. Sundance also saw the debut of Christopher Makoto Yogi’s “I Was a Simple Man,” a feature film stemming from Yogi’s experiences dealing with death in his family. Meanwhile, Alika Maikau’s short “Moloka‘i Bound,” a brief episode in the life of a recently incarcerated man trying to connect with his son, is being considered for expansion into a full-length feature.
‘This Is the Way We Rise’
With “This Is the Way We Rise,” Ciara Lacy became the first Native Hawaiian woman to have a film screened at Sundance. She had been following Osorio, an award-winning slam poet and political science professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, for a few years before deciding to make a film about her, seeing an opportunity to present Hawaiian culture “in a different kind of way” than hula or music.
“Slam poetry fits in with the oral tradition, which is very Hawaiian,” Lacy said. “There’s something vibrant and also edgy about slam poetry, and so being able to access our culture in a way that was familiar and yet different, that was what I was excited about.”
Filming took a dramatic turn when on a moment’s notice, Osorio decided to join the TMT protests on Mauna Kea. Lacy spent three days on the mountain filming the protests.
Lacy, Osorio and other Indigenous artists appear in a panel discussion “Cinema, Poetry, and Healing in Land-Based Activism,” in which they will address “healing from colonization through various forms of cultural practice.” Sponsored by the Honolulu Museum of Art in conjunction with Sundance. The free virtual event can be accessed through Wednesday via 808ne.ws/mauna.
‘I Was a Simple Man’
Yogi’s film stems from the mid-2000s, when his father and one grandfather died of cancer, and his other grandfather died by suicide.
“It was very disorienting, and I really didn’t have a way to process it,” he said. “Just that feeling of having to deal with people not being around anymore, and dealing with their legacy, and also the experience of being in the room with someone who’s about to pass on … that feeling was what I wanted to convey in the film.”
He produced a short film “Obake” based on that experience about six years ago, which “kept growing within me” and resulted in a full-length feature. In the film, an elderly man, played by Steve Iwamoto, is on his deathbed on the North Shore and is visited by family members, who share reminiscences. “There’s conflict, there’s reconciliation, there’s forgiveness within the family and within himself,” Yogi said.
Yogi got a formidable cast to support Iwamoto, a newcomer to acting. Constance Wu, star of “Crazy Rich Asians,” agreed to appear in the film after acting in a few scenes as part of a Directors Lab at Sundance. “I think it’s testament to making stuff that’s interesting to her,” Yogi said. Nelson Lee and Tim Chiou, both of whom have Hollywood credits, also are cast in the film, as well as several local actors.
A virtual program related to Yogi’s film will be streamed at 1 p.m. on Tuesday, courtesy of the museum and Sundance. Called “A Virtual Grounding with ‘I Was a Simple Man,’” the program will feature Yogi premiering a virtual installation of landscapes that appear in the film, which was shot mostly in Waialua. Several local actors will also appear on the program, which can be accessed at 808ne.ws/simpleman.
‘Moloka‘i Bound’
Maikau’s film, which has also qualified for Oscar consideration, is an eight-minute short that shows an awkward interaction between Kainoa (Holden Mandrial-Santos) and his teenage son, Jonathan (Austin Tucker), followed by an argument with the boy’s mother, Jessica (Danielle Zalopany). The pidgin-filled dialogue includes many oblique references to the boy’s connection to Hawaiian culture.
Maikau, a graduate of the Academy for Creative Media at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, praised Tucker’s pidgin and “the authenticity behind it.” Tucker even contributed to the script, offering the word “rubber” as a slang expression for something bad. “I don’t know the origins of it, but I know when he said it, it felt right,” Maikau said with a laugh.
Maikau is pursuing financing and other backing needed to adapt the story into a full-length feature. He has completed a script for it, which has already gained a measure of respect in being named to the inaugural Indigenous Black List in December. The Black List is an industry organization that annually releases a list of unproduced screenplays favored by industry executives.
“We grew up around these types of stories, and it’s sort of like one of those realities that we felt was important to portray, and portray as authentically as we could,” Maikau said.
The trailer is available on Vimeo; Maikau said the short film will be released March 1 on a “major streaming platform.”
