Literary Joe chats with animation director Daniel Sousa, who helped bring to life Kapaemahu, a new short animation that focuses on inclusion and Hawaiian culture. Sousa is also known for having worked on the Oscar-nominated short Feral in the past, and he brings a great perspective when it comes to animating. Listen to the podcast HERE.
Literary Joe – the pen name of Joseph Gharagheer, a writer who publishes articles daily for Best Little Sites on ComicBookMovie, AnimeMojo, GameFragger, Toonado, and TheRingReport – said that this might be one of the most touching chats he’s ever had on this show to date. Hina is an amazing woman and her journey of discovering herself as mahu is something she has explored through documentary filmmaking.
Joe chats with her about her new film Kapaemahu , as well as what the meaning of Mahu is, and dives deep into how Hawaiian culture has been Americanized by the Western World.
A conversation with Kapaemahu producer Joe Wilson, a human rights activist and documentary maker credited with films like Kumu Hina and A Place in the Middle. It’s a touching and informative conversation. Literary Joe is the pen name of Joseph Gharagheer, a writer who publishes articles daily for Best Little Sites on ComicBookMovie, AnimeMojo, GameFragger, Toonado, and TheRingReport. Listen to the podcast HERE.
The Hawai’i International Film Festival offered a post-screening Q&A with Kapaemahu filmmakers Hinaleimoana Wong-Kalu, Dean Hamer, and Joe Wilson, hosted by Pacific Islanders in Communications’ Leanne Ferrer. The conversation offered a sneak peek of the upcoming documentary now in-the-works, and kicks-off with a hula and oli by Kumu Patrick Makuakane and Na Lei Hulu I Ka Wekiu in Oakland, CA.
Foyle Film Festival – Derry, Northern Ireland – November 30, 2020: The winners of Best International Short, Best Animated Short and Best Irish Short were announced online on Sunday, 29 November as part of the 33rd Foyle Film Festival.
Belfast Director Michael Lennox won the award for Best Irish Short Film with his work Here’s Looking at You Kid. The film was commended by the jury as ‘funny and heartfelt, with an uplifting coda. Natural performances and surrealism made for an effective exploration as to why people would rather hide behind fictional personas than be themselves’.
Michael Lennox is the director behind the phenomenon Derry Girls written by Derry native Lisa McGee. Lennox was the recipient of a BAFTA award and Oscar® nomination for his short film Boogaloo and Graham in 2015.
Special mention in the Irish Short Film category also went to Director Claire Byrne for her short film Sister This and Adam O’Keefe Director of Where Still Waters Lie.
The winner of the Best International Short, Hizia directed by Zariab Chabman, will also qualify for further consideration at the 2022 Academy Awards. Born in Afghanistan, Director Chabname Zariab arrived in France at the age of 7 and has forged a successful career as a short film director. She has been nominated for the French Cesar awards and is currently developing her first feature film. Hizia was praised by the jury as ‘a haunting and engaging, an emotional rollercoaster with no heroes or villains just complex characters explored with humanity and nuance’.
Special mention in the International Short Film category went to Crashing from first-time director Alex Salam and Face to Face directed by Javier Marco.
The award for Best Animated Short Film went to Kapaemahu directed by Hinaleimoana Wong-Kalu, Dean Hamer and Joe Wilson. Kapaemahu reveals the healing power of four mysterious stones on Waikiki Beach and the legendary transgender spirits within them. Director Hinaleimoana Wong-Kalu is a Native Hawaiian teacher, cultural practitioner and filmmaker who uses digital media to protect and perpetuate indigenous languages and traditions. Co-directors/producers Dean Hamer and Joe Wilson are Emmy and GLAAD award-winning filmmakers. This is their fifth film with Hina.
The awards, sponsored by City of Derry Crystal, were presented online in the Closing Night screening of Rose Plays Julie. In its virtual format, festival films are available to view up to 7 days after release until 6 December 2020.
Foyle Film Festival is funded by the Department for Communities through Northern Ireland Screen and by Derry City and Strabane District Council. Foyle Film Festival Light in Motion Awards is sponsored by City of Derry Crystal.
November 25, 2020: The Animation Showcase is a curated film program whose annual “Best of the Year” selection highlights films that have the best chance at being shortlisted and/or nominated for the Academy Awards Best Animated Short Film category. It is the brainchild of Benoit Berthe Siward, a French animation enthusiast who created the initiative in summer 2016 as a joint collaboration with the Soho House London.
The 2020 selections include Kapaemahu, Float, Wild Love, Just A Guy, KKUM, My Life in Versailles, O28, and Something To Remember.
“I have a strong passion for good stories,” says Siward. “Animation can allow for a more personal approach to storytelling, as the visual aspect, through design, movement, and abstraction opens a potential new world to discover each time for the audience. The goal is to promote animation in the world as much as possible, and to increase public awareness about the level of creativity that goes into making animated films,” he says.
The Animation Showcase screens in major animation studios, startups and locations such as Pixar animation studios, Laika, Disney Animation Studios, DreamWorks, Google San Francisco, YouTube, London Blur Studio, Cartoon Network, and Soho House (London, New York, Berlin).
This year, amidst the challenges of the global pandemic, the program is very proud to launch a curated Streaming Platform for the exclusive use of people from the creative & motion pictures industry.
The special “Best of 2020” selection include Oscar-qualified short films, with exclusive Making Of videos and other special bonus programs.
If you want to plug your company with the platform, or if you are working in the motion picture industry, please contact benoit@animationshowcase.com.
by Jason Sanders – Filmmaker Magazine – November 24, 2020:
Among the festival’s “Made in Hawai’i” shorts, several stood out, with the virtual streaming process enabling audiences to pick and choose a film at a time, if needed, and to find their own way through the program. Richly animated in golds and rusts by Daniel Sousa in a manner reminiscent of Michel Ocelot’s Kirikou and the Sorceress, Kapaemahu (Hinaleimoana Wong-Kalu, Dean Hamer, Joe Wilson) retells the ancient origin story of four fabled stones in Waikiki, created to honor four “dual male and female spirit” healers from Tahiti who brought the healing arts to Hawai’i. Its post-film Zoom Q&A was particularly rewarding, with a welcoming hula performed by an Oakland-based collective and several insights from the creative team. “I am Kanaka — a native person in an island nation that was illegally overthrown and continues to be occupied by a foreign power,” notes Wong-Kalu in the film’s press kit. “Our survival as indigenous people depends on our ability to know and practice our cultural traditions, to speak and understand our language, and to feel an authentic connection to our own history. That is why I wanted to make a film about Kapaemahu, and to write and narrate it in Olelo Niihau – the only form of Hawaiian that has been continuously spoken since prior to the arrival of foreigners. We need to be active participants in telling our own stories in our own way.”
See the full awards list HERE.
By Mercedes Milligan – Animation Magzine – November 20, 2020:
Kanaka Pakipika with Pacific Islanders in Communications, with funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, present the powerful animated short Kapaemahu, available on The Criterion Channel on December 1.
Kapaemahu, tells the long forgotten story of four mahu, extraordinary beings of dual male and female spirit who brought the healing arts from Tahiti to Hawaii. Beloved by the people for their gentle ways and miraculous cures, they imbued four giant boulders with their powers. Although the stones still stand on what is now Waikiki Beach, the true story behind them has been hidden – until now.
Narrated in an ancient Hawaiian dialect, and seen through the eyes of a curious child, the story of Kapaemahu brings to life this powerful legend in richly hand-drawn and 2D animation.
The film is written, directed and produced by Native Hawaiian teacher and filmmaker Hinaleimoana Wong-Kalu, Emmy Award-winning filmmakers Joe Wilson and Dean Hamer, and Academy Award-nominated animation director Daniel Sousa (Feral). A winner at numerous international film festivals including the Tribeca Film Festival, Animayo International Film Festival, Atlanta Film Festival, Hiroshima International Animation Festival and Outfest Film Festival, Kapaemahu is a reminder of the rich cultures and diverse identities that deserve recognition and representation through storytelling.
By ALEX DUDOK DE WIT | Cartoon Brew | 11/10/2020:
Colonialist conceptions of gender have long sought to erase more expansive views. But a new generation is making work that honors their cultures’ beliefs on their own terms.
Excerpt on Kapaemahu:
To recover the past, then, can be an act of resistance. In the animated short film “Kapaemahu” (2020), directed by Hinaleimoana Wong-Kalu, Dean Hamer and Joe Wilson, an ancient mo‘olelo (“oral story”) is given new life, recounting the voyage of four healers from Tahiti to the Hawaiian Islands many centuries ago. Like Wong-Kalu, who narrates the film, and the dancer and singer Kaumakaiwa Kanaka‘ole, who composed and performs the chant in it, the healers were māhū, “not male nor female … a mixture of both in mind, heart and spirit,” as the film puts it. They brought knowledge of how to ease pain and cure illness and were welcomed and beloved. When the time came for them to depart, the grateful community hauled four boulders to the beach at Waikiki, in what is now Honolulu; the māhū infused the stones with their spirits, then vanished.
In 1941, the stones were threatened by the construction of a bowling alley, and in the decades that followed, they were moved several times, with attendant news stories that subtly erased the gender fluidity of the māhū as told in the original mo‘olelo, which was collected by the folklorist Thomas G. Thrum from a telling by James Harbottle Aalapuna Boyd. (Boyd was a colonel of the Hawaiian Kingdom before its overthrow in 1893 and husband to Helen Mani‘iailehua Cleghorn, a half sister of Princess Ka‘iulani, the last heir to the throne.) As the Pacific Islands studies scholar Teoratuuaarii Morris has documented, where Boyd identified the māhū as explicitly “unsexed by nature,” with “feminine appearance, although manly in stature,” a journalist in 1963 described them more evasively, as “handsome, kindly and soft-spoken,” and later, in the 1990s and early 2000s, they were referred to outright as “men.” “Kapaemahu” corrects the record with its woodcut-like animation, abstract yet expressive, and in so doing affirms the stones — now protected and honored on a platform in Waikiki, albeit with no mention of the māhū — as part of an ancestral landscape.
Full article here.