Every October, a festival that began as a modest academic experiment in a Moʻiliʻili movie house takes over Honolulu. The 46th Hawaiʻi International Film Festival, presented by Halekulani, runs October 21 through November 5 on Oʻahu, then continues November 6–15 on Maui, Molokaʻi, Lānaʻi and the Big Island. It is a festival you attend one ticket at a time, spread across a city rather than confined to a single hall.
The numbers for this edition are large: 84 features and 86 shorts, including 34 world premieres, six North American premieres, 12 U.S. premieres and three international premieres. Thirty of the films were made in Hawaiʻi. The program draws from Cannes, Sundance, Berlin and Busan, and sets major festival discoveries and awards-season contenders alongside emerging filmmakers, Indigenous storytellers, and Asian and Pacific Islander voices.
Opening night lands at the historic Hawaiʻi Theatre Center with the world premiere of The Navigator, directed by Jordan Manley. The Made in Hawaiʻi documentary follows the legendary Native Hawaiian navigator Nainoa Thompson, nearly 50 years after he became the first Native Hawaiian in six centuries to navigate from Hawaiʻi to Tahiti without modern instruments. Returning to the open ocean for one final voyage, Thompson sails 2,400 miles. It is a fitting curtain-raiser for a festival whose theme this year is "voyagers and visionaries."
The centerpiece is the Hawaiʻi premiere of Drifter, the directorial debut of actor Sung Kang. Most public screenings run at Consolidated Theatres Kāhala from October 22 through November 1, before the festival shifts to Consolidated Theatres Kapolei for November 3–5. The HIFILM Industry Conference returns for its second year on October 24–25 at Chaminade University's Clarence T.C. Ching Conference Center, bringing filmmakers and industry professionals together for panels and networking. HIFF46 also mounts three masterclasses, with actor Holt McCallany, producer and writer Wendy Sweetmore, and Max Geschwind of Creative Artists Agency.
The programming reflects the festival's long-standing role as a cinematic crossroads. Two Japanese genre double features celebrate that country's horror, science fiction and anime traditions. Seven films examine Black history and cultural legacy, from the Civil Rights Movement and the Harlem Renaissance to contemporary Nigeria, post-genocide Rwanda and the art of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Two titles take on journalism and democracy in South Korea, including a documentary about the country's recent martial law crisis. A surprise sneak peek of Godzilla Minus Zero, the sequel to Godzilla Minus One, screens November 4 at Consolidated Theatres Kapolei, two days ahead of its nationwide release.
This year marks a change at the top. Jean H. Lee, an award-winning journalist and policy analyst with expertise on North Korea who serves as presidential chair of the East-West Center, became executive director on September 1. "This year's festival honors Hawaiʻi's significance as a crossroads in the Pacific," Lee said, "and my mission is to champion and amplify the power of storytelling in highlighting our diverse narratives."
That crossroads idea is not a marketing line. It is the reason the festival exists. In 1981, Jeannette Paulson Hereniko was working at the East-West Center, an institution built on a diplomatic vision of fostering understanding between the United States and the regions of Asia and the Pacific. A film festival was not an obvious fit for a scholarly center. Paulson pressed the idea anyway, arguing that cinema could accomplish the center's mission better than a lecture could.
"People really wanted to hear stories from the roots, and that just wasn't happening, it just wasn't available," she recalled in a later interview with HIFF executive director Beckie Stocchetti.
In November 1981, under the slogan "When Strangers Meet," the festival opened with a free screening of Tizuka Yamasaki's Brazilian drama Gaijin: Roads to Freedom at the Varsity Theater in Moʻiliʻili. Six more films followed through the week, drawing a crowd of more than 3,500 people. The early festival was an academic affair, with post-screening discussions and seminars led by directors and critics at the Hyatt Regency Hotel and the East-West Center. Paulson raised local financing and assembled a volunteer staff, directing the festival from 1981 to 1996.
Her ambitions were distinct from the star-driven model taking shape elsewhere. "We honor film makers, not the stars, but the filmmakers, the producers, and the writers who write about issues that are important to the human race," she said the following year, when Sundance was only in its fourth year and Toronto and Hong Kong in their sixth.
HIFF was the first film festival in the United States to focus on films from the Asia-Pacific region. It spun off as an independent not-for-profit in 1990 and ended its partnership with the East-West Center in 1994. Today it describes itself as the only statewide film festival in the country, and the only Academy Award-qualifying festival with a focus on Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander filmmaking. Its 40th anniversary edition, held during the pandemic, presented more than 200 films from 45 countries.
That history shows up in the audience as much as the lineup. A critic writing for The Japan Times after the 37th edition noted that with most Oʻahu screenings held at a multiplex far from the standard tourist route, the crowds were mostly locals of all ages and backgrounds — children arriving for a Hiromasa Yonebayashi anime, elderly nisei including World War II veterans turning out for a documentary on the Nisei soldiers of Hawaiʻi.
For a visitor, the practical shape of HIFF46 is a two-week window on Oʻahu that rewards planning. Individual screenings are ticketed, and passes are sold through the festival's box office site; a pass does not by itself reserve a seat at a chosen film. Opening night at the Hawaiʻi Theatre and the neighbor-island screenings are handled separately from the Kāhala and Kapolei runs. The festival's full lineup and ticketing are available at hiff.org.
Forty-five years after seven films played to a few thousand people in Moʻiliʻili, the festival is still built on the premise its founder argued for at a diplomatic research center: that a room full of strangers watching a story from somewhere else is its own kind of foreign relations.