Big international moviefest created at East-West Center

Last week I wrote about the East-West Center and its role in creating the Polynesian Voyaging Society.

Another signature island institution that got its start as an East-West Center project is the Hawaii International Film Festival.

The idea was to use the medium of cinema to encourage cultural understanding and exchange among the people of Asia, the Pacific and the United States.

It’s a mission similar to the Polynesian Voyaging Society’s, but using cinema as its tool.

Most Americans, it was felt at the time, knew little about Asian cinema — or Asian culture, for that matter, says EWC News & Information Specialist Derek Ferrar. And while many Asians and some Pacific islanders had seen Hollywood blockbusters, they knew little of each other’s cinema.

The festival was started in 1981 by Jeannette Paulson Hereniko, the center’s then-community relations officer, along with center fellow Tom Jackson, Frank Tillman of Hawaii Loa College, Henry Wong, who was the state’s film commissioner, Victor Kobayashi from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and Linda Little, a local publicist.

“President of the center, Everett Kleinjans, asked me to think of five ideas to help the EWC improve community relations with Honolulu,” Hereniko recalls.

“I came back to him the following week with five ideas. One of them was to start a Hawaii International Film Festival in order to promote cultural understanding among the people of Asia Pacific and the U.S. through film. I had taken the goal of the EWC at the time and simply added the words, ‘through film.’”

“He liked three of the five ideas and said that I should go out to the community and try to raise the money for all three of them and see which one of them would fly. He said the center couldn’t put any money in any of them.

“Hank Wong, the Hawaii film commissioner, urged me to concentrate on the film festival idea. But we really didn’t have a film festival until Art Gordon, general manager of Consolidated Theaters, donated the Varsity Theater as a place to show the movies.”

Later Gordon added other theaters on several islands. “Until Art Gordon came along with his support, everything was only an idea!

“That first year Jack Lord wrote a check for a big $5-0-0-0 so we could pay for the shipping in of the 35 mm prints and bring in a filmmaker or two. He did this every year afterward for the rest of his life. Gulab Watumull doubled it, if I would bring in Indian films.”

The festival’s first event offered free films from six countries, Ferrar says. They showed to an audience of more than 5,000, who eagerly queued up outside the old Varsity Theater, not far from the center.

When the festival began in 1981, it chose as its slogan “When Strangers Meet.”

For that first festival, organizers selected films not necessarily for technical expertise or popularity, but for their power to speak to other cultures and the world.

Filmmakers led after-film discussions on the dynamics of strangers meeting, often teamed with academics or film critics who were drawn to Honolulu for the films and for a related symposium with the filmmakers.

“Within five years Hereniko was overseeing a festival attended by 30,000,” Ferrar says, “that required many screening locations and hundreds of Friends of the East-West Center volunteers.”

The festival selection committee reached deep into the international film scene to deliver an increasingly innovative group of filmmakers.

Films such as “Utu” (New Zealand) and “The Piano” (Australia) received their first major U.S. exposure in Honolulu at the festival.

The festival was among the first to introduce the work of director Chen Kaige (“Farewell My Concubine”) and cinematographer Zhang Yimou (“Raise the Red Lantern” and “Hero”).

In 1994 the film festival hosted the U.S. premiere of “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” which would become America’s highest-grossing foreign-language film.

Hereniko says the EWC leadership was not always behind the festival in its first few years. “We were constantly criticized for being a public relations program that was using too many resources at the EWC and getting more publicity than academic research.”

On the other hand, the HIFF staff and volunteers “felt we could transform not only our community, but the way the entire world looked at films made by Asians and Pacific islanders.”

Hereniko credits EWC officials Mary Bitterman, George Chaplin and Doug Murray with getting the film festival accepted by the East-West Center and integrated as a program.

The ultimate solution to the tension, Hereniko says, was for the film festival to leave the EWC and become a separate nonprofit organization, which it did in the early 1990s.

Despite the tension, Hereniko says that “without the East-West Center, we may not have had that mission statement that gave us a clear focus and sense of place.”

Today the Hawaii International Film Festival draws tens of thousands, including an international A-list of directors, producers, actors and film critics.

One of the strongest boosters of the festival over the years was Roger Ebert, the late Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic, who was a frequent guest at the festival, introducing and judging films and leading frame-by-frame workshops on classic films.

It took courage for the center to stick with the idea of a film festival in the early days, Ebert said, but popular culture is crucial to understanding how people from various societies view the world.

From his perspective the festival contributed enormously to the overall mission of the center. “It has become a crossroads for major figures in the cinemas of all nations of the Pacific Rim,” he said.

Robert Lambeth, the festival’s current executive director, credits his three predecessors — Jeannette Hereniko, Christian Gaines and Chuck Boller — “whose great vision and love of a challenge helped keep HIFF alive for so long despite the depressing odds at times.”

“As we begin our next 35 years, HIFF remains the festival promoting cultural understanding among the people of Asia, the Pacific and North America,” Lambeth says.

“We endeavor to recognize new and emerging talent, promote career development and original collaborations through innovative education programs, and by facilitating dynamic cultural exchange through the cinema arts.

“HIFF has been able to entertain and educate over 62,000 audience members statewide throughout the year, and our new HIFF Foundation annually supports over 5,000 students statewide through our HIFF Education programs.

“Additionally, this year we have awarded over $20,000 in scholarship money for 10 students from Hawaii to study abroad at the Cannes Film Festival, the Shanghai International Film Festival and the Producers Guild of America’s conference in Los Angeles.”

The Hawaii International Film Festival will next be held Nov. 12-22.

Bob Sigall, author of the “Companies We Keep” books, looks through his collection of old photos to tell stories each Friday of Hawaii people, places and companies. Email him at Sigall@Yahoo.com.