ABOVE: Filmmaker Chris Kahunahana at home on Oahu.
On a rainy day in Manoa District Park, Christopher Kahunahana—dark hair pushed back, Givenchy shades hiding his blue eyes—sits under a tree, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette. His first feature film, Waikiki, ran the festival circuit in 2020 and is, he says, considered the first feature-length film written, directed and produced by a Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian). "It took me forever, but it's not like I wasn't trying," he says, noting that he started making short films three decades ago. "There was no example of a Hawaiian filmmaker who made fictional feature films." If Kahunahana was the frontrunner, a handful of other Native filmmakers have now cracked the code on making movies, writing, directing and producing their way onto the big screen.
Kahunahana subscribes to what he calls the "Werner Herzog school of filmmaking": that if he never lived an interesting life, he would never have a worthy story. So, as a younger man, he left Oahu for San Francisco, then New York. But eventually a friend back home told him he'd finance the renovation of a decrepit building in Honolulu's Chinatown if Kahunahana would help him run it as a nightclub. The neighborhood was "gnarly" back then, he says, but they went ahead and opened the Nextdoor Cinema Lounge and Concert Hall. "I brought electricity to that block," he recalls. Kahunahana outfitted it enough—a projector, some seating—to start a film festival, because the more prominent Hawaii International Film Festival wasn't picking up his and his peers' films.
After nine years of late nights, Kahunahana decided to make a real go of filmmaking. He worried that the lifestyle of a nightclub proprietor would eventually get the better of him. (His unprintable description of his future self wore a tracksuit.) "I was, like, 'I'm gonna be really scary, I'm gonna be like a character in a film,'" he says. He sold the club, hoping he'd lived enough by his Werner Herzog standard to make a decent film.
How? "Don't effin' die," he says. "Then lock yourself in a room and don't come out until you're finished writing." The proceeds from the club's sale let him focus on writing "Lahaina Noon," a short he released in 2014. He used the next five years to make Waikiki, but he put the production on hold in 2019 to live on Mauna Kea during the protests against the Thirty Meter Telescope. "It changed my edit completely," he says. The film, a reflection on the alienation wrought by colonialism in Hawaii, follows a hula dancer's descent into madness. "Done well, it's more than just a means of mass hypnosis, right? It can be used as a means of critical reflection," he says. "I get to dive into other people's lives and live them and help tell their stories in a way that helps me understand and have more empathy toward them. If you don't start from that, then it's just all pretty pictures."
A forerunner of a new generation Native Hawaiian filmmakers, Kahunahana's first feature, Waikiki, was released to acclaim in 2019. His screenwriting secret: "Lock yourself in a room and don't come out until you're finished."
Kahunahana (in green) on the set of Waikiki, about a Native Hawaiian woman's descent into madness.
Films shot in Hawaii tend to be concocted on the continent. Place is prop, local characters caricatures. "Rob Schneider playing a Hawaiian dude and making him just the most ridiculous character and really the butt of a joke," says Bryson Chun, a screenwriter from Oahu, referencing the Adam Sandler comedy 50 First Dates. "Very few shows that are being made in Hawaii will put Pacific Islanders at the core of their narratives. They're often side characters or comedic relief or victims or criminals." To Chun, Hollywood is like a house party that Hawaiians were not invited to.
But in the past decade, Kanaka filmmakers have found openings: an indie film at Sundance, a mega-budget Apple TV+ series about eighteenth-century Hawaii. The work has sprung from the tight community of filmmakers with ties to Hawaii. Some are Hawaiian, some Island-born and raised, some spent years as residents. Some have roots from across Polynesia, especially Aotearoa (New Zealand), which has proven to be a role model to Hawaii's burgeoning film community. Besides its multi-billion-dollar film industry, which produced internationally acclaimed features like Whale Rider and Once Were Warriors, the island nation is home to Taika Waititi, the half-Maori filmmaker behind Jojo Rabbit and Hunt for the Wilderpeople, whose name Hawaii's filmmakers repeatedly invoke. "We're all sneaking in," Chun says of Hawaii's Native filmmakers. "The endgame would be that there's enough of us in there to open the front door," he says. "The more we empower local people to tell the stories, the better."
In 2018, through the Honolulu-based Ohina Filmmakers Lab, a workshop for aspiring Island auteurs, Chun met his mentor in Dana Ledoux Miller, who is part Samoan and attended film school at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Chun admired her writing for Narcos and The Newsroom and told her he'd love to work with her. She asked him for a TV episode he'd written, but he had nothing for TV. He pulled together a pilot for an original show called Poi Dogs. It didn't air, but the script became his calling card.
Chun is back on Oahu from Los Angeles after co-writing Moana 2, sitting in a cafe in Kaimuki, sporting black glasses, a trim beard, a black T-shirt and shorts. Running down his leg is an ala niho tattoo, a stripe of repeating rectangles and steplike patterns that symbolize his life's purpose: storytelling and mentoring. In recent years Chun has become a mentor at Ohina Labs. The same lab has helped boost the careers of other rising Hawaiian filmmakers, like Alika Tengan, who was mentored in 2017 by Joe Robert Cole, the cowriter of Marvel's Black Panther. "There were some extremely talented individuals," Cole says of Ohina Labs' participants. "The Ohina community is strong, and there are opportunities to work there," he says. "I have not experienced quite the same feeling of support and collaboration across an entire film community anywhere else."
Erin Lau, a freelance director and producer from Oahu, interned on Lost and Hawaii Five-0. Currently based in LA, Lau is beginning to see a path forward for filmmakers who don't want to leave the Islands for Hollywood. "What changed is that making Native films got popular," she says.
Bryson Chun shooting his short film "Other People," about a relationship's final moments, at Windward Mall on Oahu in 2019.
Alika Tengan based his first feature, Every Day in Kaimuki, on his friend Naz Kawakami, who starred in the film.
Cole was impressed with Erin Lau, another Ohina Lab alum. "I loved her film," he says of "The Moon and the Night (Ka Mahina a Me Ka Po)" about a Hawaiian girl whose father gets her beloved companion killed in a dogfight. Lau, who now works in LA as a freelance director and producer, has made a number of other short films, including "All I Ever Wanted," about a teen romance. "Filmmaking was a way for me to talk about things I didn't know how to talk about," says Lau, who was raised in Kahaluu and starting making films in middle school. While studying film at UH, Lau interned on Hawaii Five-0 and Lost, but it became clear that if she wanted to pursue film, she'd have to leave for LA. The directors of those shows—the only ones she knew being paid to direct—weren't from the Islands. "I didn't see a path forward here," she says. But Lau hopes one day to be able to return home full-time: "Hollywood meetings" happen over Zoom, and the industry is becoming more interested in the work of Indigenous filmmakers—like the show Reservation Dogs (co-created by Waititi) and the film Fancy Dance. "I think what changed is that making Native films got popular," she says. "I'm not really worrying about what Hollywood wants."
Kahunahana's films pointed the way for Tengan. "He showed that it's possible to tell these stories in a really elegant and innovative way," Tengan says. Starting in 2017, he made one short film a year: "Keep You Float," "Mauka to Makai," then "Molokai Bound." Tengan was hoping to develop "Molokai Bound" into a feature, but the pandemic foreclosed on an expensive production.
Tengan's cinematographer, Chapin Hall, proposed they look for a less resource-intensive project. "I was, like, 'Well, I have this friend, Naz, who's preparing to move to New York, and I've never met anyone like him. I wonder if he'd be interested in making a movie about that experience of leaving Hawaii for the first time,'" Tengan says. He went over to Naz Kawakami's apartment one night and recorded his life story to develop the contours of a script they would write together. What emerged was the indie feature Every Day in Kaimuki, about a fictionalized Naz, a radio DJ who hems and haws over whether to leave Oahu. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2022, to a warm (albeit pandemic-era online) reception. Tengan later completed a feature-length version of Molokai Bound, about a father returning from prison and reconnecting with his son, which debuted at the Seattle International Film Festival this May.
"Once you see that it's possible, it allows you to pursue it in a way you might not have," Tengan says. "Not only is it possible, but what can I add that's different? Our perspectives on being Native Hawaiian are so varied. That's the beauty of it."
Left to right: Jonah Okano, Tengan and Mitchel Merrick take questions at the 2018 Ohina Fillmmakers Lab showcase. An incubator for Island talent, Ohina has helped launch the careers of several Island filmmakers. Okano codirected "Mauka to Makai" with Tengan, and Merrick directed the recent Hawaiian-language short "Kukini."
On a Saturday morning in May, twenty aspiring actors sit in folding chairs in a studio in Kakaako and listen. "I want to go where culture is, New York—or at least Connecticut," a young woman pleads. She sits beside another young woman at the front of the room, reading from Greta Gerwig's screenplay for Lady Bird. A list of questions is scribbled on a whiteboard next to them: Who am I? What do I want? What is my secret?
Watching up close in a rolling chair is their coach for the day, Honolulu-born Tia Carrere, who's appeared in several films, including Wayne's World and Rising Sun. She rolls closer to interrupt. She wants more confidence, more presence. "When I worked with Sean Connery," she tells the class of her time on the set of Rising Sun, "He'd say, 'When you walk into the room with your shoulders back and your head held high, you look like you own the room.'" The two women nod and straighten up. "We remind people what life can be when lived to the fullest," Carrere continues. She wants them to think, "I'm just here to open my heart."
Another pair of actors takes their turn. "Call me Lady Bird!" declares the big-wave surfer and former candidate for city council Makua Rothman. At scene's end, he tugs on an imaginary car door handle and tumbles out of his seat.
This acting workshop sprang, indirectly, from Chief of War, Jason Momoa's forthcoming Apple TV+ series. The multi-hundred-million-dollar show, a Hawaiian Game of Thrones (the series that launched Momoa's career into the stratosphere), tells the story of the unification of the Hawaiian Islands in the late eighteenth century. While thousands of Hawaiians were cast as extras (warriors on a battlefield, for example), the producers struggled to find enough talent for lead roles. A handful went to Hawaiians who had never acted before, says Thomas Paa Sibbett, who co-created, co-wrote and executive-produced the series with Momoa. Most went to Maori actors from Aotearoa who'd learned to speak Hawaiian.
The producers shot for six weeks in Hawaii before hitting the state's $50 million tax credit limit. Thailand, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico were the more affordable alternatives, but leaving Polynesia didn't feel right to the show's creators. "It broke our hearts," Sibbett says. "Jason and I were adamant: We needed to go to a place with lineage connections. If we couldn't shoot in Hawaii, it had to be Aotearoa." They ended up shooting most of the show there.
Tengan (in white) on the set of the feature-length version of Molokai Bound. He's cast actor Holden Mandrial-Santos (seated at center) in his other films, including Every Day in Kaimuki, the short "Mauka to Makai" and the original short-form "Molokai Bound."
One day on set at Mataora Bay, Sibbett approached an extra, a Maori man wearing alii (chiefly) regalia—a mahiole (feather helmet), ahu ula (feather cloak) and malo (loincloth). He asked him how it felt to wear the costume. The actor said he felt drawn to the beach. "I had to go over there to see if the ancestors were present. I walked out there and I could feel them." Sibbett turned around and walked into the production office to recount what had just happened. "That's why we're here," he said.
Momoa and Sibbett, both Hawaiian, grew up on the continent and visited the Islands throughout their youth. After a childhood in Washington state hearing stories of Hawaiian warriors and royalty, Sibbett attended college at Brigham Young University on Oahu to pursue Hawaiian studies. While in college, Sibbett was lifeguarding at Kualoa Ranch's Secret Island when he read an article in a local newspaper: The Rock was going to star in a movie about King Kamehameha I. (That film has yet to be made.) "If Hollywood wants Hawaiian stories," Sibbett realized, "I could do that." Inspired, he wrote his first script, about the executioners of people who broke Hawaiian rules, or kapu. He wrote another about Kaluaikoolau, the Hawaiian man who hid out in Kauai's Kalalau Valley to avoid being forced into the Hansen's disease colony on Molokai. That got Momoa's attention. He and Momoa made Braven (2018), then worked on Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom (2023), which opened up possibilities for productions with bigger budgets. Sibbett's "long game," he says, is to make sure those future productions can employ Hawaiians in Hawaii.
Anticipating future demand, Sibbett's collaborators on Chief of War, producers Angie Laprete and Brian Keaulana, decided to develop a more robust stable of talent. In May 2023 they started the International Cultural Arts Network (ICAN), the nonprofit that hosted the acting workshop. "This was a direct response to Chief of War," says ICAN's third co-founder, Robert Suka, who didn't work on the show. The twenty-person class, ICAN's second, will graduate this summer. ICAN's founders plan to develop programs for writers, directors and producers, taught by more experienced professionals with ties to Hawaii or broader Polynesia.
Keaulana, with half a century of experience in Hawaii's film industry, never wants to leave home and hopes future generations won't have to. He grew up in Makaha, the son of legendary waterman Buffalo Keaulana, and as a teenager began touring the world as a pro surfer, model and actor. (He eventually got his younger cousin Jason Momoa into acting, he says.) Most of his career, he worked on stunts before moving into second-unit directing and producing—positions that will allow him to connect the next generation to big projects. "It's all about community," Keaulana says. "I like for elevate the next legacy."
Big ideas from small places: The future of Native Hawaiian filmmaking begins in studios like Kahunahana's. "I get to dive into other people's lives and live them and help tell their stories in a way that helps me understand and have more empathy toward them," Kahunahana says. "If you don't start from that, then it's just all pretty pictures."
Chris Kekaniokalani Bright, a 32-year-old screenwriter from Windward Oahu, will see his first feature script translated to the big screen when the live-action Lilo & Stitch (featuring Tia Carrere) comes out in the next year. After college Bright worked as an assistant at Disney. He helped out on Moana and met two of the film's writers, Aaron and Jordan Kandell. The twin brothers, born and raised in Honolulu, were busy pulling 120-hour weeks on the script, but afterward they made time to read one of Bright's.
Home on Oahu, Bright's grandmother gave him a binder of documents from his grandfather's thesis on the 1932 Massie Trial, in which a group of white people were charged with murdering a young Hawaiian man, Joseph Kahahawai. Bright paid a visit to Kahahawai's grave. Within a year he'd written Conviction, a fast-paced courtroom drama about the trial's warring lawyers, the famous Clarence Darrow against the humble Honolulu prosecutor John C. Kelley. The Kandells, feeling they'd spotted a new talent, signed on as producers and sent the script around to agents and managers, who reached out to Bright. He took fifty meetings in LA. Clint Eastwood showed interest. The script made it onto the 2018 Black List—the top yet-to-be-produced screenplays floating around Hollywood—before it was optioned. But it still didn't get made, underscoring just how difficult it is for local talent—or any talent-to break into the larger filmmaking world.
Bright has since adapted Aloha Rodeo, a book by David Wolman and Julian Smith about paniolo (cowboys) from Waimea, for Disney, but that project, too, got shelved. Up next, he's slated to write a biopic on Duke Kahanamoku. In time, more stories about Hawaii will be told by those most connected to it. "I think you're going to see, in the next ten to twelve years, a renaissance," Bright says, thinking of Taika Waititi. "Like New Zealand in the early 2000s."
