The 46th Hawai'i International Film Festival opens on the evening of Oct. 21 at the Hawaii Theatre in downtown Honolulu with the world premiere of "The Navigator," a Made in Hawai'i documentary directed by Jordan Manley and centered on Nainoa Thompson, the navigator who nearly half a century ago became the first Native Hawaiian in six centuries to sail from Hawai'i to Tahiti without modern instruments.
Thompson and Manley are expected to attend the opening-night screening. The film follows Thompson as he returns to the open ocean for one final voyage, a 2,400-mile passage to Tahiti sailed alongside a new generation of trainee wayfinders, carrying forward the knowledge instilled in him by the Satawal master navigator Mau Piailug.
For HIFF executive director Jean H. Lee, the choice of opener was not a close call. Opening the festival with "The Navigator" is, she said, "a tremendous honor," and the film "could not be more deeply connected to Hawaii and to who we are as a festival."
"Nainoa Thompson's legacy reaches far beyond an extraordinary achievement in navigation," Lee said. "It represents the reclamation and perpetuation of ancestral knowledge, a living connection across Oceania, and the responsibility to pass that knowledge to the next generation."
The story behind that legacy begins with a question Thompson could not answer. After Hōkūleʻa's 1976 maiden voyage to Tahiti, Piailug — the one traditional master navigator then willing to teach outsiders — did not sail the canoe home; he returned to Satawal, and Hōkūleʻa came back to Hawai'i guided by compass and sextant. A group of young Hawaiians, Thompson among them, wanted to make the voyage again the old way. Teaching himself from books and courses at the University of Hawai'i, Thompson was stumped by a moonrise that came up south of where he expected. He called the Bishop Museum planetarium and was told to try Will Kyselka, who met him at 6 a.m. and, in the recollection Thompson later set down for the Polynesian Voyaging Society, could move the stars anywhere in the world and answer every question he had.
In 1980, with Piailug aboard in silence — offering, by one widely told account, a single correction about a seabird — Thompson navigated Hōkūleʻa to Tahiti and back. The voyage helped set off the revival of wayfinding across the Pacific, and it is that arc, from reclamation to transmission, that "The Navigator" traces to its end point: a teacher's last long passage, made with students at the helm beside him.
Manley came to the canoe by a different route. A Canadian documentary filmmaker and photographer based in Vancouver, British Columbia, he built a career on films about human relationships with nature, including "Treeline" and "Out On A Limb," both of which collected festival awards. He is also a lifelong sailor who knew of Hōkūleʻa from books and videos long before he ever stepped aboard; his first sail on a waʻa kaulua was on Hōkūleʻa's 2021 voyage to Papahānaumokuākea. He has since voyaged from Tahiti to Hawai'i and sailed with the canoe in Alaska and British Columbia during the Moananuiākea Voyage, and the film grew out of a partnership between Patagonia Films and the Polynesian Voyaging Society.
In his crew biography for the voyaging society, Manley described what the canoe came to mean to him. Hōkūleʻa's story initially meant "possibility," he said, and later "friendship and even a sense of family." He added: "Hōkūleʻa means beauty, grace, trust and security."
The venue for the premiere carries its own history. The Hawaii Theatre opened in 1922 as a vaudeville and silent-film house, was proclaimed the "Pride of the Pacific," and by the 1980s had fallen into such disrepair that a nonprofit, the Hawaii Theatre Center, was formed in 1986 to save it from the wrecking ball. After a renovation, it reopened in May 1996 as a 1,400-seat performance center. Returning HIFF's opening night there for the first time since before the pandemic is, Lee said, part of what makes this edition "an especially meaningful homecoming."
Thompson's festival presence extends beyond the opening screening. He will receive the HIFF46 Halekulani Legacy Award at the HIFF46 Honoree Gala: Voyagers & Visionaries on Oct. 29 at the Halekulani Hotel. "Through Nainoa and the Polynesian Voyaging Society, Pacific seafaring is not simply being preserved — it continues to live, evolve and inspire," Lee said.
"The Navigator" screens again at 8 p.m. on Nov. 3 at Consolidated Theatres Kapolei and at 7:30 p.m. on Nov. 7 at the Kahilu Theatre on the Big Island. HIFF46 runs through Nov. 5 on Oahu, then continues Nov. 6 through Nov. 15 at venues on Molokai, Lanai, Maui and the Big Island, presenting 84 feature films and 86 shorts, among them 34 world premieres, six North American premieres, 12 U.S. premieres and three international premieres. The festival's other honorees this year are Ke Huy Quan, receiving the Halekulani Golden Maile Career Achievement Award; Sung Kang, the Halekulani Maverick Award; Bryson Chun, the Leanne K. Ferrer Trailblazer Award presented by Pacific Islanders in Communications; and Luciane Buchanan, the Halekulani New Vanguard Award. Kang's motorsports drama "Drifter" is the centerpiece presentation.
Opening night, though, belongs to the man on the canoe and the filmmaker who sailed with him. It is a ticketed, seated screening at the Hawaii Theatre rather than an open gathering, but it is a one-time occasion: the first public showing of a Hawaii-made film about a Hawaii-made legacy, in a theater that has been part of downtown Honolulu since Warren G. Harding was in the White House, on the night the festival comes home.