#qdoc

[13thgenfilm]

still glowing from the amazing weekend at #Qdoc in the city of Roses. (at Portland, Oregon)

[transoregon]

PSU Pride events: Queer Documentary Film Festival screening 5/21

QDoc Queer Documentary Film Festival Screening: Kiki

8:30PM, Hollywood Theatre

As a community partner for this particular film screening at QDoc, folks from the QRC will be meeting up to watch Kiki, screened at the Hollywood Theatre. Anyone 23 and under can receive a free ticket! Free youth tickets and regular price tickets are available in advance at the QDoc ticketing website.

Kiki revisits the world of New York’s voguing balls, explored 25 years ago in Jenni Livingston’s seminal film Paris Is Burning. The Kiki scene is a youth-focused subset of the larger vogueing scene, with strong activist and social service components.

In this film collaboration between Kiki gatekeeper Twiggy Pucci Garçon and Swedish filmmaker Sara Jordenö, viewers are granted exclusive access into this high-stakes world, where fierce ballroom competitions serve as a gateway into conversations surrounding the Black Lives Matter and Trans Lives Matter movements.

This new generation of ballroom youth use the motto, “Not About Us Without Us,” and Kiki in kind has been made with extensive support and trust from the community, including an exhilarating score by renowned ballroom and voguing producer collective Qween Beat. Twiggy and Sara’s insider-outsider approach to their stories breat

Since 2007 QDoc has shown award-winning films fresh from Sundance, Berlin, Hot Docs, Tribeca, Amsterdam and other top-tier festivals. We have shown historical films, personal stories, artist biographies, experimental work and topical films dealing with current controversies. Visiting artists have included prominent film makers from all over the U.S. and from as far as Italy and Australia, who have participated in lively discussions after the screenings. We have hosted emerging filmmakers as well as 3 Academy Award winning directors, enabling dynamic audience interaction with artists.

[kumuhina]

"Kumu Hina is Culturally-impacting, Enjoyable and Transcendent" - Portland Examiner Review

by Samuel Lora for the Portland Examiner:

In this tear-jerking documentary titled Kumu Hina (Teacher, Hina), Dean Hamer and Joe Wilson explore two lives, whose generational gap brings touching gravity to both the loss and revival of the ethnic and civil right struggles of socially oppressed minorities. In this case, Hawaiians.

The documentary is done in such a way that it touches the core ever so swiftly as the lives of Hina, her husband, other mahus and the young Ho'onani, unwrap and become deeper intertwined with one another.

Hina Wong-Kalu is a cultural fighter whose ancestry is the merging point of her romantic life, political involvement and desire to pass on Hawaiian tradition to younger generations. Her mahu (just like the indigenous thought behind two-spirit; a third gender involving male and female energies) status comes into play when a six-grader, Ho'onani Kamai, wants to be part of the boy dances. Hina claims her duty is to restore that center of love and aloha (harmony with nature and one another).

Hina's relationship with her younger husband, Hema Kalu, from Fiji, brings another layer of socioeconomic decisions which allow the audience to be understanding of how romance, stability, companionship and citizenship matter to everyone across the board, yet they become more intricate and borderline difficult to navigate for those socially oppressed.

Hina, born Collin Wong, transitioned to female in 1993 and since has become an elementary school hula teacher and chair of the O'ahu Island Burial Council. The young kane-wahine (girl-boy), Ho'onani, is socially fearless despite the lonesomeness of no longer living in a culture, that unlike before, does not consider mahus to be valued teachers, care-takers and healers.

Ho'onani's role as the 'tomboy' of her class and group is the perfect balance to Hina's feminine masculinity. Ho'onani's relationship with her family, especially with her mother, is touching and uncomfortable at times. This balance of a mother respecting her daughter's freedom to be 'boyish' is tense when adding "she can do what she wants, but she is a girl".

Regardless of the documentary's take on gender roles, and its characters fears and reservations, this culturally-impacting film is enjoyable and transcendent.

Watch this documentary alongside other great documentaries during Portland's QDoc Film Festival from 15th-18th, 2014. The festival is curated and planned by David Weissman, director of We Were Here and The Cockettes.