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Waikiki: Cultural Dysmorphia in Paradise — Film Review
Mystery. A tale of cultural survival in a post-modern wasteland.
The capitalistic quest for progress has always furthered the gap between man and the wild.
In Waikiki, an experimental mystery-drama from Christopher Kahunahana (the 2014 recipient of Sundance Institute’s Screenwriters Lab Fellowship for Native American and Indigenous filmmakers), it’s that classic battle between the natural world and modernization that comes at a terrible price for indigenous Hawaiians.
The story takes place on the south side of Honolulu, in the city of Waikiki. Here, as art imitates life, native Waikikans have been forcefully displaced from their motherland to the slums of the concrete jungle; where they endure a vicious cycle of poverty that poisons generations on an existential level.
With once ancestral ties to nature severed and degrading substandard living conditions haunting their every waking moment, a surreal void of Lynchian horrors is born…
