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Hawaiian Soul was screened on the opening day of the 38th annual Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, which provides a launching pad for Indigenous Pacific Islander productions in Hollywood. Shorts, documentaries, animation and features by and about the Native peoples of Polynesia, Melanesia and Micronesia, as well as by Asian and Asian-American filmmakers, are being screened at various venues in the world’s movie capital by this filmfest that spotlights South Seas Cinema, taking place May 5-13.

Since 1983 Visual Communications, a nonprofit organization, has presented LAAPFF, dedicated “to develop and support the voices of Asian American and Pacific Islander filmmakers and media artists who empower communities and challenge perspectives.” The L.A. presentation of the outstanding Hawaiian Soul is a perfect onscreen expression of this mission statement by LAAPFF, which provides a perch for works by and about Oceanic talents and topics in Los Angeles. The below is the first in a series of reviews of selections from this year’s Pacific Islander works at LAAPFF.

HAWAIIAN SOUL: ACTIVIST/MUSICIAN GEORGE HELM AND HELMER ʻĀINA PAIKAI

Since 1898, when a Thomas Edison camera crew on location in Honolulu shot the first footage ever filmed in the Pacific Islands, the South Seas Cinema movie genre has been dominated by Haole (Caucasians) male filmmakers lensing productions primarily for the consumption of Haole audiences in order to make money. These motion pictures include Mutiny on the Bounty and The Hurricane, written and directed by, and usually starring, Haoles. This phenomenon – call it “Haole-wood” – is examined in books such as Hawaiian film historian Matt Locey’s White Lens on Brown Skin, dropping this summer (see: https://mcfarlandbooks.com/product/white-lens-on-brown-skin/).

V.I. Lenin proclaimed: “For us, the cinema is the most important of the arts.” The leader of the Russian Revolution said this around 1922, the year Benito Mussolini’s blackshirts rose to power in Italy, and later decreed: “Film work facilitates fascist penetration.” Both extremes of Left and right recognized the central role motion pictures could play in propaganda, in reaching the masses with their messages and agitating them to take action. Albanian director Roland Sejko’s The Image Machine of Alfredo C. is about an Italian cameraman who shot newsreel-type footage for Il Duce’s fascists and then for the Communists in Albania.

Thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine, Senate approval of President Biden’s FDA Commissioner nominee Robert Califf, MD, was barely covered by news media.

But everyone who cares about conflicts of interest at the FDA will find the choice disheartening.

According to disclosures in a November 20, 2013 Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) opinion piece that Califf cowrote:

Palestinians are justifiably worried that the mandate granted to the United Nations Agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, might be coming to an end. UNRWA’s mission, which has been in effect since 1949, has done more than provide urgent aid and support to millions of refugees. It was also a political platform that protected and preserved the rights of several generations of Palestinians. 

 Though UNRWA was not established as a political or legal platform per se, the context of its mandate was largely political, since Palestinians became refugees as a result of military and political events - the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people by Israel and the latter’s refusal to respect the Right of Return for Palestinians as enshrined in UN resolution 194 (III) of December 11, 1948. 

At a certain point, as I was reading the book I’d recently been sent, a strange transformation began occurring: Gradually, as I moved ever deeper into it, I wasn’t so much reading as quietly singing a hymn . . .  participating in a chant.

The book is A Promise to OurChildren: A Field Guide to Peace, by Charles P. Busch, an online version of which was sent to me by Adam Vogal, president of the Oregon Peace Institute.

When I ran for mayor of Buffalo, New York, last year, my past-due parking tickets became a major reason for reduced favorability among voters. When Stacy Abrams ran for governor of Georgia in 2018, there was a lot of talk in the mainstream media about how much debt she was in. I share these examples because in general, the working poor do not willfully withhold payment for debts. We are faced with the very real decision between paying often illegitimate debts (like parking tickets and student loans) and feeding our children or paying for life-saving medical treatment for our loved ones.

The latest stab at reviving nuke power is mocked by the actual reactors.

Today 93 are allegedly operable in the US, more than 400 worldwide….including the 15 in Putin’s Ukraine crosshairs, plus four lethal corpses at Chernobyl.

Every atomic reactor is an apocalypse in progress, set to explode at any time from error, terror, age, nature.

Every nuke spews heat, radiation, carbon, gases. They all kill birds, fish, people, eco-systems, the planet. They all create unmanageable wastes, untamable fire, unconscionable inequity, uninsurable danger.

All US reactors are more than 25 years old. They can’t get private insurance. Nobody can guarantee their individual safety.

A dozen-plus earthquake faults could shatter California’s Diablo Canyon, says former NRC site inspector Michael Peck. So could the San Andreas.

Diablo is embrittled, cracked, decayed, under-maintained. Its radiation, heat and chemicals fry the planet and the seascape. Its owner killed eight people in San Bruno with an avoidable gas explosion, then eighty more torching northern California.

This brilliant marathon GREE-GREE #93 takes us first to a Green California with TATANKA BRICCA and BEN EICHERT.

We then spend an astonishing 40 minutes with JOHN BRAKEY & KEN BENNETT discussing major new legislation proposed in Arizona to protect the ballots and establish a digital image library to guarantee maximum accountability.  Should it pass this could become the first such bill to pass anywhere in the US.

JOEL SEGAL takes our third section into the realm of a nationwide strategy for grassroots elections to be launched at a national summit zoom on June 11.

We also hear from ANTHONY GUTIERREZ of Common Cause about the horrors of race-based disenfranchisement in TX.

JULIE WIENER explains some welcome reforms in NY.

ERIC LAZARUS introduces an in-depth analysis of the economic benefits of cancelling student debt.

Congressional candidate PETER MATHEWS tells us of a “lost” campaign mailer.

RACHEL COYLE updates us on the insanity in Gerrymandered Ohio, with a nod to Florida from SUSAN PYNCHON & WENDI LEDERMAN.

This two-hour deep dive into democratizing our energy & elections is not to be missed!!!

 The horrific scenario, however, awaits countries in the Global South which, unlike Germany, will not be able to eventually substitute Russian raw material from elsewhere.