MWFF Critics Lab Reviews Kapaemahu
As part of their pre-festival experience, the MWFF Critics Lab cohort were recently issued with a challenge from mentors Cerise Howard and Laura La Rosa. The task: Watch an 8-minute short film, Kapaemahu, and write up a 150-word (or near enough) mini-review. It sounds like an easy task but our mentees soon found out how difficult it is to distill their experience of a film in such a constrained format.
The resulting reviews were fabulous and were later workshopped with the lab to form a collaborative piece from four perspectives.
Kapaemahu
Dean Hammer, Joe Wilson, and Hinaleimoana Wong-Kalu’s Kapaemahu is a poignant tale set to captivate audiences the instant the luscious hand painted animation graces the screen. In this stunning short film, we are taught the native Hawaiian story of four gender diverse beings, known as Māhū, that enriched their lives long ago. The animation is breathtaking, as if a painting collided with the ocean, flowing endlessly from one frame to the next. This powerful short film also touches on the impact of western colonisation on the Hawaiian culture and heritage through the suppression and modification of the Kapaemahu story. It is an incredible experience to hear this story through Olelo Niihau (one of the oldest spoken Hawaiian languages) as Wong-Kalu endeavours to educate others on the history of her people. For such a short piece of film, the impact it leaves on you is extraordinary.
Laura Mansted
“For only when you understand the true history of the stones, shall you behold their living power.”
In the hand-drawn animation Kapaemahu, Hinaleimoana Wong-Kalu, Joe Wilson and Dean Hamer breathe new life into the history of Māhū people [native Hawaiian third-gender], in the face of their ongoing attempted erasure by US imperialism. Fluidly sliding from conch shell calls at dawn to eruptive star-scapes at sundown, Kapaemahu is narrated in Olelo Niihau, the only form of Hawaiian spoken continuously since colonisation.
“Tall and deep in voice, but gentle and soft-spoken.”
The animation visits the legacy of four Māhū, who brought their revered healing practices from Tahiti to Waikiki, and imbued four stones with these powers. Seven hundred years later, it is fitting that a child spots the stones’ sea green glow, now nestled amongst Waikiki highrises.
Kapaemahu honours the ongoing refusal of the Hawaiian Māhū people in a joyful and provocative way, where truth-telling in history marks the first step towards justice.
Lara Fielding
There are two twisting tendrils, sunburnt and honeyed in colour. Their glow gilding the black wind, they swim towards each other, coiling around one another, cavorting and forming flesh. Female and male, alloyed in one.
Joe Wilson, Dean Hamer and Hinaleimoana Wong-Kalu’s Kapaemahu vivifies history’s cold body, enlivening the legend of four Māhū – of both female and male spirits – whose healing powers are now reposed in four boulders in Honolulu. Dredging this story from time’s sediment, Kapaemahu is a compelling exhibition of loss, narrated in the only unbroken Hawaiian language, Olelo Niihau. Though the boulders remain centuries later, the pigment of third-gender history that colours their surfaces has been blotted out by colonialist violence.
It is with a broad brush that Kapaemahu paints, but necessarily so. By rendering the trajectory of cultural memory with Daniel Sousa’s artistic hand, the film’s ultimate strength resides in its play between the cosmic and the intimate – both ensnared in colonialism’s pernicious bite. For, as Kapaemahu devastatingly reminds us, it bites us still.
Jessica Zheng
Kapaemahu, an animated film by Dean Hamer, Joe Wilson and Hinaleimoana ‘Hina’ Wong-Kau, uses the moon as the transitional focal point to weave seven-hundred years into eight delicate minutes. Just as the brightest things best illuminate the dark, Kapaemahu’s shimmering animation revels in revealing the island’s history. That is, the story of the healing powers of the third-gender ‘Māhū who, after ameliorating the island’s wounds, contained their spirits within the sacred stones on Waikiki Beach.
Now, the stones sit surrounded by beachgoers, their history censored within metal barriers of institutionalised indifference. An ethereal dappling light tones the film. Despite being on the beach’s surface, the story has been plunged underwater, fighting to float. Hina’s strong lilting narration in the Olelo Niihau language, married with fluid, painted animation, mobilises it to the surface.
Kapaemahu is softly urgent in its retelling of Kanaka history: the familiar formative expansion of the world.
Sarah Jasem
Kapaemahu is screening online at MWFF with Ruahine: Stories in Her Skin + Pasifika Stories: Taonga kiriata poto. Available to watch 17th-24th February via ACMI Cinema 3. Rent the session here.