Early morning on January 13th, 1903, a steamship named SS Gaelic, carrying about 100 Koreans, docked in Honolulu Harbor. They were the first Korean immigrants to Hawaii and wanted to start new lives. Between 1903 and August in 1905, approximately 7,400 immigrants, most of them male, arrived in Hawaii to also start new lives. Finding …
Syngman Rhee, the founding president of the Republic of Korea spent a total of thirty years in Hawaii. The first 25 years occurred before he was elected the founding president and five years were after he resigned from the presidency. What is the significance of 30 years in one’s life span? What does Syngman Rhee’s …
BLURRING THE COLOR LINE follows director Crystal Kwok as she unpacks the history behind her grandmother’s family, who were neighborhood grocery store owners in the Black community of Augusta, Georgia during the Jim Crow era. The film weaves personal family stories with memories from the larger Chinese and Black communities, opening up uncomfortable but necessary …
For nearly a century, Dame Whina Cooper’s voice never stopped asserting the rights of her people – land rights, women’s rights, education rights – and striving for unity between Māori and Pākehā (New Zealand Europeans). In 1975, Whina (Rena Owen), frail but still sharp as a knife, is roused to unite Māori to fight not …
Three decades ago, there were no waka hourua (Māori watercraft), no ocean going waka/canoes and no surviving knowledge of celestial navigation in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Oral history and carved artifacts were all that remained of the ancestral Pacific voyagers. Sir Hekenukumai ‘Hek’ Puhipi Busby has helmed this renaissance in Aotearoa/New Zealand. He reached out across the …
Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Robert Caro and legendary editor Robert Gottlieb have worked and fought together for 50 years, forging one of publishing’s most iconic and productive partnerships. Now 86, Caro is working to complete the final volume of his masterwork, The Years of Lyndon Johnson; Gottlieb, 91, waits to edit it. The task of finishing …
1893. The Hawaiian Kingdom has been overthrown by a Western power just as an outbreak of leprosy engulfs the tropical paradise. The new government orders all Native Hawaiians suspected of having the foreign disease banished permanently to a remote colony on the island of Moloka’i that is known as ‘the island of the living grave’. …
In the archaeological find of a century, the remains of King Richard III — presumed scattered over 500 years ago — were discovered under a parking lot in Leicester in 2012. The search was spearheaded by amateur historian Philippa Langley, whose passion and unrelenting research were met with skepticism by the academic establishment. Directed by …
With aloha, HIFF acknowledges its occupation of ancestral, traditional and contemporary lands of the Native Hawaiian people, the Kānaka Maoli.
With gratitude, we honor the ʻāina itself and the generations who steward it.