The Hui Mo‘olelo: Lahaina Film Festival will hold a screening of five animated short films on Oʻahu, following one on Maui last month. The free event starts at 6:30 p.m. on Thursday, March 27, at Ka Waiwai Ma Mōʻiliʻili in Honolulu. It features the work of artists Sasha Hercik of Maui and Richard O’Connor of New York, as well as students from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa School of Cinematic Arts.
The festival is presented by the Maui Public Art Corps in collaboration with the County of Maui, Maui Historical Society, Lahaina Restoration Foundation, and the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa Outreach College. The free event will also include a question and answer session with several of the artists and storytellers.
O’Connor spoke with Aloha State Daily about his creative process, as well as themes in one of the featured films, which is entitled “Ola nā iwi.”
“We visualize this sort of like a sketchbook as if you were walking through the town doing quick little watercolor studies,” he said. “The Pioneer Hotel plays a central role. The school. And, also just the daily life of people. In our story, a number of artists gravitated towards the story of the temple, so there will be different interpretations of the Jodo [Mission] temple.”
That temple had burned down previously, he said.
“The community around this temple has literally been through this before, and they're still trying to rebuild from two years ago, but it's something that the temple community had been through it previously,” he said. “And they realized, ‘This is the cycle of life here. This is what we need to continue to do again.’ ”
A 15-minute piece, like this, typically takes at least six months to a year to create, O’Connor added. In this case, the piece was pulled together in a much shorter time frame, he said. This particular film pulls together six recordings, which feature generational wisdom and talk about common places from different perspectives.
“There are a lot of generational stories,” O’Connor said. “There are people who are talking about growing up in the 1950s or even earlier and the way that they remember the town, and they're in conversation with people who are younger — in their 30s or 40s — and they're talking about how they remember the town.”
The project includes recordings of conversations with Jennifer Freeland and her father Haines Burt Freeland; Louis Garcia III and Kaliko Storer; Teva Medeiros and his grandfather Timothy Medeiros Sr.; Coach Earle Kukahiko and Kaliko Storer; Abraham "Snake" Ah Hee and Myrna Ah Hee; and Reverend Gensho Hara of Lahaina Jodo Mission Temple and his daughter, Yayoi Hara, according to the film’s project page.
One of stories was recorded in Japanese. O’Connor reached out to a colleague to help with editing that clip since he does not speak Japanese, he added.
Loss, trauma — and the corresponding rebuild of community — are themes he has seen first-hand. O’Connor has lived in New York City for more than 30 years, he added.
“I've lived here through various periods of destruction,” O’Connor said. “I was here for 9/11. Here for the floods. Here for all these other things. And what makes the city resilient is the people of the city. We have blackouts, and neighbors are feeding each other. We have pandemics, and people are taking their elderly neighbors to the doctor. It’s the community which makes the place.”
For O’Connor, the project brings up certain themes of humanity.
“The idea that we can all rebuild this community and preserve this community through our connection to one another and our sharing of these stories and our sharing of these experiences — to me, it's specific to Lahaina in so many ways, but it's also specific to every person on earth who has been through tragedy, been through devastation, and seen redemption and restoration with their neighbors, with the larger world. To me, that is something which we need to do and celebrate and promote, however we can.”
O’Connor traveled to Maui for the first screening of the short film in February. He told some of the students who attended the event as their first public film screening, that they will “never have another experience like that screening,” he said.
“This feeling in the room is so — indescribable,” he said. “The different levels of emotion. People start giving testimony of their own life experiences. I don't know if that will be replicated outside of Maui. Hopefully it will be, because it's really an unbelievable screening experience. I've been in 100 film festivals, and I've only once experienced anything which is remotely close to this and even that was still a little bit far away.”
The event is free. RSVP.
Katie Helland can be reached at katie@alohastatedaily.com.
