Pacific Islanders in Communications

A transgender Native Hawaiian teacher inspires a young girl to fulfill her destiny of leading the school's male hula troupe, even as she struggles to find love and a committed relationship in her own life.

Naz, a cynical and charismatic 20-something, has spent his entire life in tranquil O’ahu, Hawaiʻi, skateboarding with his friends and hosting a nightly radio show where he spotlights emerging musicians. When his girlfriend Sloane nabs the chance to move to bustling New York, Naz begins preparing for their big move, planning every detail down to his cat’s absurd flight plan. Even when dreaming about what life outside the island might look like, however, Naz wonders whether uprooting his world is the right decision, and if anywhere will ever really feel like home when he’s always been an eternal outsider.

Long ago, four extraordinary beings of dual male and female spirit, led by Kapaemahu, brought certain healing arts from Tahiti to Hawaii and were loved by the people for their gentle ways and the miraculous cures they performed.

The Rapanui community on Easter Island fights to prevent an environmental collapse due to overwhelming tourism and industrial progress, and and to preserve their cultural traditions.

Dear Aloha is a short documentary profiling Diasporic Hawaiians living thousands of miles away from home. Dear Aloha shows how aloha sustains our people amidst distance, loss, and longing.

Mele Murals is a documentary on the transformative power of modern graffiti art and ancient Hawaiian culture for a new generation of Native Hawaiians. At the center of the story are two renowned street artists - Estria Miyashiro (aka Estria) and John Hina (aka Prime) - a group of Native Hawaiian youth, and the rural community of Waimea. Set against the resurgence of Hawaiian language and culture of the past twenty years, Estria and Prime tell how their street art has taken them on personal journeys to discover their history, identity and responsibilities as Hawaiian people.

More than half a million native Hawaiians were living in the islands at the time of European contact in 1778. Within 50 years, that population was cut in half as Western diseases claimed thousands of lives. A litany of events followed: American missionaries preached unfamiliar ideas and customs; sugarcane and pineapple plantations absorbed individual farmlands; waves of immigrant workers arrived, making Hawaiians a minority in their own land; and WWII brought a lasting military presence. University of Hawai'i sociologists estimate that the extinction of full-blooded Hawaiians could come within the next 45 years. This compelling story of a race displaced and now on the verge of extinction is brilliantly told in this award-winning documentary created by the great-granddaughter of Hawaiian high chiefs and English seafarers.

A 1997 documentary by Micronesian scholar, Vicente M. Diaz, that follows a new generation of traditional outrigger canoe builders and navigators from Polowat, Central Carolines, Federated States of Micronesia, and Guam in their respective efforts to continue and resuscitate an ancient tradition of outrigger canoe carving and sailing in the late twentieth century. Like the motif of water that flows through the documentary and blurs lines between surface and depth, and between water, land and air, an indefatigable tradition and aesthetic of seafaring is shown to also challenge pat and problematic distinctions between past and present, tradition and modernity, indigenous and Christian religiosity and spirituality, that prevail in conventional understandings of Micronesian culture and history.