Pacific Passages

Released: 1999

Director: Caroline Yacoe & Wendy Arbeit

Language: English

Theme: Ethnicity & Cultural Identity

Summary

Caroline Yacoe, director of “Pacific Passages,” has worked for over 28 years filming the Pacific and collecting and curating art from the region. This documentary, crafted for Hawai’i state-mandated seventh-grade classes in Pacific Island Studies, has received acclaim from a wider audience, receiving the Gold Apple Award for Educational Excellence.

Narrated by a young girl of New Guinean descent, the film includes images of cultural artifacts from the collections of the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum and the Honolulu Academy of the Arts, as well as footage of rituals and ceremonies showing how these artifacts are used all over the Pacific.

Viewers can compare Hawaiian and Tahitian dance and witness initiation rites from Papua New Guinea. We see geography not just as the study of maps, but the study of how people carve their lives from the land, and how the land in turn shapes their lives.

Images of high-rise hotels and skyscrapers in Honolulu are juxtaposed with scenes of people harvesting and processing copra from coconuts, providing a varied introduction to the comparative study of Micronesia, Melanesia, and Polynesia.

1 Comment

M.K. says:

March 27, 2012 at 10:32 pm

Having just watched ‘Skin Stories’ this is an interesting contrast in styles. This feels more like what I would expect from a museum standpoint, while ‘Skin Stories’ has much more coming directly from the artists and cultural practitioners. It’s nice to see the artifacts in context here, though, something that most museum displays don’t convey.

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