Who Are Film Festivals For?

Earlier this month, the Hawaii International Film Festival (HIFF) completed its multi-island event. Hawaii as a location for a film festival may initially seem counter-intuitive, but there are a lot of logical points in its favor. With the main event centered in Waikiki, HIFF can easily entice both a large potential audience both of spectators as well as official guests, South Korean director Eom Tae-hwa and actor Don Lee among them. A famed majority-minority territory of the United States, HIFF also makes the most of its position to screen majority Asian and Polynesian films for its majority Asian and Polynesian population. This selection alone justifies the film aficiando’s trip away from the mainland United States, simply due to how difficult it can be to find such movies in any other context.

From Hong Kong, Nomad offers a weird retrospective look at psycho teen sex comedy in the early 80s, a generally incomprehensible late plot twist involving assassins certainly being in the style at the time, and for a couple of decades after that really. Mondays from Japan was a fan favorite, depicting the recurring repeating dream at a salarywoman’s office. Framed as The Office meets Groundhog Day, Mondays was frankly a lot more philosophical than either of those considerably more white pieces of media, with a likewise refreshing lack of soapboxing about the salaryperson lifestyle as is common from the white gaze.

Secret: Untold Melody  features its own nostalgic look at its remake of the Jay Chou film. Chopin may have been white, although fetishizing the life of a nineteenth century composer with a troubled love life is quite a bit different than the white fetishism more common in Asia these days. In fare more meeting with contemporary expectations, Concrete Utopia  and A Normal Family from South Korea are yet more bleak tales from the country about class conflict as a means of getting away with murder.

Of course, the funny thing about class conflict at film festivals is how we tend to describe it as deriving from the films themselves, not the festival where they take place. And HIFF, as in the festival, is a grim exemplar of this material condition. Hawaii at large isn’t doing great these days, with HIFF stuck awkwardly between being a festival that seeks out guests, but also a local event at a local mall of dubious accessibility to guests and locals alike. I wouldn’t recommend using the buses in Honolulu, personally, and it’s easy to see why festival staff offer personal shuttle access to whatever relevant guests may need it to actually get to festival events.

I saw little evidence of other festival goers using them. HIFF may or may not have been a major community event- it was often difficult to tell with how busy the staff were. From that same staff I heard that HIFF attendance was high. I could never make much sense of the rush and online ordering methods of getting tickets even though I personally never needed to use them. I found screeners at the hotel to be more practical for evaluation purposes than actually trying to go the film festival proper- which was frustrating, given how that goes against the film-festival spirit.

But what does that mean, anyway? In 1967, Fred Wellington wrote the article Liberalism, Subversion, and Evangelism: Toward the Definition of a Problem wherein he discusses, among other topics, the validity of the New York Film Festival as an institution in regard to its antiestablishment credentials. Wellington notes that nearly any idea of the New York Film Festival as antiestablishment is flawed from the outset, as it takes place at the center of establishment Art (the Lincoln Center) funded by establishment power and Establishment money. You can make a similar argument for nearly any film festival really, but the HIFF is a topic of interest in this context because, funded and staffed as it is by volunteers, can Hawaii break that milleu?

The final film I saw was rather appropriate in this context–the documentary Join Or Die about the seminal study Bowling Alone. The basic argument in the documentary and the book on which it’s based is that we have long underrated social club in terms of their importance as a means of civic engagement. It claims that we as a society don’t do social clubs anymore, and we should start more social clubs as a means of improving our democracy.

The irony of the message there is that film festivals themselves are clubs of a sort-and not greatly performing ones. Like all our other clubs, they’re heavily commodified, and HIFF clearly feels compelled to compete on those terms even as it struggles to platform more obviously on-brand cinema of particular interests to locals. Motu Haka was the best of these I saw, depicting Melanesian cultural resurgence struggling to, among other things, get ruling authorities to recognize that Melanesians aren’t Tahitian.

Other indigenous content left me feeling ambivalent. Island Cowgirls had an annoying lack of context, not even discussing vaquero history. No Press went in hard on the importance of tribal free speech, with just enough inside baseball to be indecipherable. Godzilla appears in the HIFF banner, and also spiritually in antinuclear films which aren’t exactly wrong but do, as is typical for the genre, act as if nuclear weapons are indistinguishable from nuclear energy and imply that other forms of energy generation are mostly harmless in comparison.

It’s all abstract, with a target audience that seemed more like old white retirees happy to stand in rush lines than the younger, more insecure minorities such films are intended to represent. I just didn’t see much evidence of a strong community, in the sense that Join Or Die and Motu Haka emphasize cultural engagement as necessarily pushing for real change. As is distinct from just, you know, the changes promised by the movies.

But to be fair, I’m not at every festival venue, at all times, with HIFF being something of a year-round project. I’m doubtful there’s really any more to that story than just checking the HIFF schedule for when the next event is- there are screenings on every island and different days. It’s not too hard to coordinate a trip to Hawaii with HIFF, given that autumn and spring aren’t peak tourist seasons. Whether any tourist actually should do such a thing is difficult to argue. You might learn something, and probably will. Yet at the end of the day, Hawaii is largely seen as a tourist paradise, whatever the individual itinerary. And tourists don’t always use buses.