Hawaii International Film Festival

SUBHEAD: Films showing on in Waimea on Kauai, Saturday October 26th and Sunday the 27th.

By Linda Pascatore on 27 Oct 2013 for Island Breath - 
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2013/10/kauai-international-film-festival.html)



Image above: Still freame from "The Dressmaker's Daughter".  From (http://program.hiff.org/films/detail/the_dressmakers_daughter_2013).

WHO:
Hawaii International Film Festival (HIFF)
2013 HFF Fall Festival(http://program.hiff.org/schedule/week/a/2013-10-23)

WHERE:
On Kauai: showings at Historic Waimea Theater, St Regis Hotel, and Kukui Grove Cinema

WHEN:
Friday, Oct 26th through Sunday, Oct 27th 2013.

WHAT:
Saturday Schedule:
Historic Waimea Theater:
2:00 pm: Dancing Karate Kid
7:00 pm: Boomerang Family

St Regis Hotel:
2:30 pm: Plastic Paradise: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch
6:30 pm: The Haumana

Sunday Schedule:
Kukui Grove Cinema:
11:30 am: Kon-Shin

Historic Waimea Theater:
11:30: Sand Wars
1:30 pm: Made in Hawaii Shorts
4:00: The Rocket
6:30: If Only ("Sana Dati")

St Regis Hotel:
2:30 pm: Lion Ark
5:00 pm: Ola

KON-SHIN

 Video above: Trailer for "Kon-Shin" showing in Kukui Grove Cinema at 11:30pm Sunday. From (http://youtu.be/PS5jeWnkqwk).

Synopsis:
"Director Yoshinari Nishikori's new drama, based on the Kenichi Kawakami novel KONSHIN, showcases classical wrestling (Koten) and the natural beauty of the Oki Islands in Shimane Prefecture, where the history of Sumo dates back 300 years, played out in rings made of giant tree trunks ceremoniously carried into halls and covered with straw mats. Steeped in ancient traditions in a place that holds onto traditional culture we see a Japan which may not be familiar.

The film follows Hideaki (Sho Aoyagi) who reluctantly returns to his hometown of Okinoshima and remarries Tamiko (Ayumi Ito), causing a rift with his motherless young daughter. He throws himself into training with the local sumo stable and, gradually earning the respect of the once-estranged townspeople, he is selected for the coveted Ozeki position in the upcoming tournament. Preparing for the big championship, which is held every 20 years at Mizuwakasu Temple, the challenge becomes overwhelming, and the bond of his family and friends on the island support him as he steps into the suspense of final competition. 

SAND WARS

 Video above: Trailer for "Sand Wars" showing in Waimea at 11:30pm Sunday. From (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAPfwwb59uY).

Synopsis:
By the end of the 21st century, beaches will be a thing of the past. That is the alarming forecast of a growing number of scientists and environmental NGOs. Sand has become a vital commodity for our modern economies: we use it in our toothpaste, detergents, and cosmetics, and computers and mobiles couldn’t exist without it.

Our houses, skyscrapers, bridges and airports are all basically made with sand: it has become the most widely consumed natural resource on the planet after fresh water. The worldwide construction boom fuelled by emerging economies and increasing urbanization has led to intensive sand extraction on land and in the oceans, with damaging environmental impacts.

Sand Wars takes us around the world as it tracks the contractors, sand smugglers and unscrupulous property developers involved in the new gold rush, and meets the environmentalists and local populations struggling to reverse the threat to the future of this resource that we all take for granted. - See more at: http://program.hiff.org/films/detail/sand_wars_2013#sthash.jdbkOzr2.dpuf

THE ROCKET

Video above: Trailer for "The Rocket" showing in Waimea at 4:00pm Sunday. From (http://youtu.be/dDxt4gKyGfo).

Synopsis:
Winner of both the Best First Feature award at Berlinale and Best Narrative Feature at Tribeca, THE ROCKET is a heartwarming coming-of-age tale set entirely in Laos. Kim Mordaunt, who made the excellent documentary BOMB HARVEST, which was also set in Laos, is clearly invested in the people and culture of the region, and tells this story with great empathy and authenticity. Ahlo is the surviving twin of a difficult birth and is believed by some to be a source of bad luck.

When 10-year-old Ahlo and his family are displaced by the construction of a dam, further tragedy strikes as they relocate. Upon reaching the relocation village, Ahlo befriends young Kia and her eccentric uncle Purple, but is still ostracised by the superstitious community, and even treated with suspicion by his own family.

Ahlo decides that his only hope of redemption is the Rocket Festival: a riotous, and dangerous, annual competition where huge bamboo rockets are set off to provoke the rain gods. Despite being too young to enter the competition, Ahlo is determined to succeed. Set amidst a beautiful landscape, and with lovely performances by the young actors, THE ROCKET is a sensitive and uplifting film.
- See more at: http://program.hiff.org/films/detail/rocket_the_2013#sthash.oQfKBveS.dpuf

IF ONLY

 Video above: Trailer for "If Only" ("Sana Dati") showing in Waimea at 6:30pm Sunday. From (http://youtu.be/aQ0Ao4QQ-yI).

Synopsis:
Winning awards for Best Direction and Best Film in the Director’s Showcase at this year’s Cinemalaya, HIFF is proud to present IF ONLY, the final film in Jerrold Tarog's Camera Trilogy (CONFESSIONAL and MANGATYANAN being the two previous films). It is a love story about a woman whose wedding is thrown into disarray when a mysterious person arrives and reminds her of the man she really loves.

GMA Network’s Sunday All Stars host Lovi Poe plays Andrea — a woman with secrets of her own. As she begins to prepare for her upcoming nuptials to the ambitious politician Robert (TJ Trinidad), Andrea meets Dennis (Paulo Avelino) the wedding videographer — who is on a mission to get information from her.

As the two begin to bond, Andrea begins to reminisce on her secret past, and her doubts on marrying Robert begin to grow. A moving film about contemporary love and relationships in present day Philippines, IF ONLY is imbued with a romantic spirit that is set to send audiences on an emotional roller coaster. - See more at: http://program.hiff.org/films/detail/if_only_2013#sthash.qWGWYj0I.dpuf


Image above: Still freame from "The Dressmaker's Daughter" showing Sunday at Waimea Theatre at 1:30pm.  From (http://program.hiff.org/films/detail/the_dressmakers_daughter_2013).

THE DRESSMAKER'S DAUGHTER

Synopsis:
"It's 1940 in Hawaii. Barbara Kim is 8-years-old living in a friendly community of diverse cultures and ethnicities. She’s raised by her widowed mother, a first-generation Korean immigrant who’s a hard-working, skillful dressmaker and successful businesswoman. At an early age, Barbara dreams of becoming a broadcaster, but life takes an unexpected twist when her mother falls ill.

Barbara’s priorities change as she supports her ailing mother and pays for her mounting hospital bills. While Barbara makes a career change to be by her mother's side, a popular TV show needs to find a new host. The producer conducts months of auditions without finding the right replacement. He begins to lose hope until he makes an important discovery that leads him to Barbara Kim.

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Christmas Story

SUBHEAD:  Unlike the depressing "facilities" most of our festivals take place in, Hubbard Hall is a center of life for this struggling community.

By James Kunstler on 10 December 2012 for Kunstler.com -
(http://kunstler.com/blog/2012/12/christmas-story.html)


Image above: South elevation of Hubbard Hall in Cambridge, NY.  From (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hubbard_Hall,_Cambridge,_NY.jpg).

On Saturday, the town next to us, Cambridge, New York, put on its annual Christmas breakfast in the main theater of its old opera house, Hubbard Hall. Cambridge is a farming town in a farming economy that died and is just beginning to be re-born. The town occupies a landscape of tender hollows and gentle hills that rise toward the Green Mountains of Vermont twenty miles east. This topography allowed a specialty economy of seed husbandry to thrive. Each little hollow, like a little isolation ward, could be used to cultivate pure seed strains of a vegetable untainted by other varieties.

The modest red-brick factory in the center of town was never a smokestack industry. It was a seed-sorting and packing operation. Today, the "re-purposed" building occupies a very mixed assortment of activities: a specialty woodworking shop, a health club full of cardio machines, and artist's studios. The town - indeed, much of Washington County - has attracted bohemians over the years. It is just a little too distant from New York City to have been taken over by weekenders, and my guess is that the way things are going the danger of that is now past.

Of course, bohemian artists are generally not wealthy and a glance down Main Street shows all the usual signs of distress visible in the shattered economies of small towns around the region. Many of the operating storefronts are antique shops - an effort to wring residual value from emptying the attics and barns of homesteads under-occupied and under utilized, the strip-mining of history. Many of the big wooden houses, typical of the 19th century when large inter-generational families were the norm, are slowly decrepitating. They require a lot of expensive maintenance, which has been impossible for decades now, and it shows.

Hubbard Hall, a big wooden heap with its Second Empire mansardic tower, was erected in 1878 for the traveling shows and vaudevilles of the day and shuttered in the 1920s. It was rescued from oblivion in the 1970s and has evolved into a very busy center for the lively arts, which now includes two other buildings, freight barns adjacent to the defunct railroad station. There's a ballet studio, a music rehearsal room, a room for kids' art classes, and a separate building for contra dances. The programming is very rich. The old theater, where at least four plays and sometimes operas are performed by a capable local troupe each year, is the heart of the operation and that is where last week's Christmas breakfast was held.

Image above:  Hubbard Hall performance of Mozart's  "The Magic Flute".  From (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hubbard_Hall,_Cambridge,_NY.jpg).

It is the kind of gathering place for people that could never be built now under the absurd burden of our construction codes. And that is finally what I want to talk about here: the magnificence of the room itself and how it affects the beating life of this struggling community. Unlike the depressing "facilities" most of our festivals take place in around the USA - the gymnasiums and Holiday Inn "function rooms" with their extraneous furnishings, acoustical ceilings studded with fire-prevention shower heads, off-gassing carpets, and atrocious fluorescent lighting - Hubbard Hall has a lofty painted ceiling and a graceful swooping wooden balcony in the rear. The proscenium arch is decorated in floral motifs out of the William Morris pattern book. The big room smells like old wood and history and the stairs to it creak musically.

For seventeen years, the town has put on a Christmas breakfast devised to celebrate the culture of a foreign land, mostly for the sake of the children who grow up in a town that is, in the language of social services, ethnically un-diverse. This year it was Poland. Now, it happens that I joined a string band about a year ago that practices every week and plays for the monthly contra dance. I play fiddle, an instrument that is easy to play badly. We practiced four Polish folk dance tunes for the month preceding and rehearsed with the dancers, a troupe of middle school girls, once.

I was not prepared for how splendid the event turned to be. The theater walls were decorated with pine boughs. Little electric lights and swags of pine edged the apron of the stage and the balcony rail. Many tables were set where the audience usually sits (the chairs are movable), covered with table-cloths, with a big platter of Christmas cookies at the center of each. Children about ten or eleven circulated with platters of pirogies and strudels. The bustle of life in that room was enchanting. There were two seatings at the breakfast, nine and eleven, both of them very full. The program on stage was a mixed bag of dance, story-telling, puppetry, and musical performance, all done surprisingly well and with the wonderful élan of people who know and care about each other. When both seatings were over, our little band broke spontaneously into Christmas carols, which we hadn't practiced at all, and somehow managed to play pretty well as the townspeople drifted toward the exits.

I maintain that there is something about the room itself, its small-scale magnificence, that honored the presence of the people in it, and amplified all the pleasures of being together for the purpose of festivity. America these days is mostly composed of places that are not neutral as they seem, but positively hostile and antagonistic to what is most human in us - the mechanism that produces love. To quote myself from a book published some time ago, we built a nation of scary places and became a land of scary people. Thus, we are truly fortunate that the long emergency is upon us, because now circumstances will compel us to do things differently.

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Island Breath is off the Grid

SUBHEAD: We will be off the grid at the Great Blue Heron Music Festival for the next three days. No posts until afterwards.  

By Juan Wilson on 6 July 2012 for Island Breath - 
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2012/07/island-breath-is-off-grid.html)


Image above: Entering the Blue Heron Festival by tractor shuttle or on foot. All photos by Juan Wilson on 7 July 2008.

We have been going to this festival for the last twenty years... as long as we've been married. Our children grew up there and our friends grew gray. It's held a couple of miles from our old home in western NY. The proprietor is a good friend. The event is held on 300 acres of pastures and woods surrounding a 5 acre lake with an island in it.


Image above: Listening to live music on a hillside arena under the shade of old maple trees. 

 Since moving to Kauai, Hawaii, we've missed a few. This year should be a good one. About 5,000 people will camp for three days to listen and dance to an eclectic blend of music into the wee hours.


Image above: Fathers and daughters play bluegrass on the stage of big dance tent.

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Halfway There

SUBHEAD: Take the quiet and peace you can find and cherish it. Be sure to plan a way to find more where ever you are.  

By Juan Wilson on 1 July 2011 for Island Breath - 
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2011/07/halfway-there.html)


Image above: The hand of Tara Nevins, of Donna the Buffalo, on the concertina at the Great Blue Heron Music Festival. Photo by Juan Wilson.

The year 2011 is half over and were on the back straightaway and heading for the third turn. We're on the mainland and when this morning is over my wife Linda and I will be heading over to the Great Blue Heron Music Festival (http://www.greatblueheron.com) in Sherman, New York.

It's mostly old time music, zydeco, folk, world and tunes that could (if needed) be played acoustically. It's on for three days and nestled in rolling hills and woodlands and surrounded by Amish farms.

Being at the Heron allows us to escape the predominant culture's expression of subliminal violence that is the Fourth of July weekend.

Every year that midyear celebration of patriotic militarism returns with the ritual charring of meat, waving of flags and setting off explosions. Whoopie!

The fact is there is not a whole lot to celebrate in much of America. Floods, fires, draught, and poverty seem to be spreading without control as the social fabric shreds and disintegrates.

 In the last few days the state New York declared fracking for natural gas a good thing while th entire state of Texas was declared a natural disaster area... And don't forget the state Minnesota was shut down at midnight last night.

 The second half of this year should be a corker. Greece is waiting in the wings to default as the Middle East continues to roil. Take the quiet and peace you can find and cherish it. Be sure to plan a way to find more where ever you are.

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