THE WIND AND THE RECKONING was the Opening Night Film for the 42nd Hawai‘i International Film Festival presented by Halekulani. The film is currently in commercial release. Filmed in just 16 days during a worldwide pandemic, THE WIND AND THE RECKONING is a film I’ve anticipated for over a year. I first heard of it […]
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MY SMALL LAND was an official selection of the 42nd Hawai‘i International Film Festival presented by Halekulani. Previously known for directing the short film CIRCLE, Emma Kawawada from the Bun-buku production group makes her feature film directorial debut with MY SMALL LAND. It is a beautiful drama and bitter-sweet coming-of-age movie which follows the challenges
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EO was an official selection of the 42nd Hawai‘i International Film Festival presented by Halekulani. The first thing you notice about EO, Jerzy Skolimowski’s bold reinterpretation of Robert Bresson’s 1966 drama AU HASARD BALTHAZAR, is that it lacks a human touch. This isn’t to say that it lacks emotion: EO abounds in pathos and humor,
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BROKER was an official selection of the 42nd Hawai‘i International Film Festival presented by Halekulani. Hirokazu Kore-eda’s latest film was perhaps my most anticipated out of the prestigious Cannes Film Festival. Not only was it met with rave reviews and considered a top contender for the Palme d’Or, but Kore-eda’s previous film SHOPLIFTERS was one
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BAD AXE is an official selection of the 42nd Hawai‘i International Film Festival presented by Halekulani. It is currently available to view on the Festival’s streaming platform until November 27th (Hawai‘i only) – Purchase Tickets Filmmaker David Siev successfully creates a portrait of American life during a time of turmoil in his new film BAD
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Warning: The following contains spoilers for PROJECT WOLF HUNTING (2022) and HUNT (2022). Over the course of HIFF42, I watched two South Korean films that were centered around and saturated with brutal violence: one considered it a spectacle, something that it assumed the audience wanted to see, and something that could easily be assigned moral
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GOODBYE CRUEL WORLD screened at the 42nd Hawai‘i International Film Festival presented by Halekulani When regarding the art and ingredients of making a gangster film, Quentin Tarantino stated, “a good, pulpy story or you need an aspect of criminality that you want to put under a microscope.” He also added that a satirical subtext is
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Absurd and thoroughly enjoyable, it is only fitting to feature Amartya Bhattacharyya’s ADIEU GODARD as our October HIFF SELECTS film in honor of the French auteur’s recent passing. Back to absurdity, here is the premise for the film: An old porn-addict accidentally brings home a DVD of a Godard film, and falls in love with
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A New York Times “Noteworthy Film of the Summer,” September’s HIFF SELECTS is for all the dog lovers out there in an incredible true story of resilience, determination and lots of elbow grease. FREE PUPPIES! Chronicles this incredible story–When Hurricane Katrina left more than 250,000 pets stranded, the infrastructure of modern pet transport for a
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Following a streak of commercial hit films in his native South Korea, director CHOI Dong-hoon (THE THIEVES being one of his most prominent, which HIFF’s Closing Night in 2012) enters the echelon of big budget sci-fi extravaganzas with ALIENOID, the first of two planned films (part 2 comes out early next year). ALIENOID is a
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With aloha, HIFF acknowledges its occupation of ancestral, traditional and contemporary lands of the Indigenous Hawaiian people, the Kānaka Maoli.
With gratitude, we honor the ʻāina itself and the generations who steward it.
