Reel Wahine of Hawai'i

- Season 1

(2018)

Prolific Native Hawaiian producer HEATHER HAUNANI GIUGNI recounts her start in 1980's male-dominated world of news, "If you were female and wanted to do something, you were ridiculed!" She left news to start the first woman-owned production company in Hawaii. She then developed the first television show produced by and about Native Hawaiians. She won a National Emmy for her nationally syndicated food and travel series for PBS, Family Ingredients and founded Uluulu, the official moving image archive for Hawaii.

It's 1981 on Oahu's Sand Island and camerawoman VICTORIA KEITH fearlessly films as Honolulu police evict Hawaiian activists by force and residents burn down their homes in protest. Sand Island Story became a seminal film of the Hawaiian Renaissance. The first woman hired as a news photographer in Hawaii, Keith produced and directed dozens of films highlighting Hawaiian culture, and the environmental and sustainability challenges of living on islands.

JEANETTE PAULSON HERENIKO is a film producer who transformed the landscape for Hawai'i-based filmmakers when she founded the Hawaii International Film Festival in 1981. She produced The Land Has Eyes, the first feature film shot in Fiji, with filmmaking partner and spouse Vilsoni Hereniko. She is producing their second feature Until the Dolphin Flies and writing a screenplay based on her autobiographical one-woman play, When Strangers Meet.

An early advocate for queer film in the Islands, Connie Florez organized and curated the Honolulu LGBT Film Festival. She produced Kumu Hina a documentary featuring transgender teacher and native Hawaiian activist Hinaleimoana Kalu Wong.

Cinematographer, Director and ANNE MISAWA's directorial credits include Waking Mele, (Sundance Film Festival), Eden's Curve, and the feature length documentary, State Of Aloha. Her work as cinematographer includes the stunning Margarita with a Straw and Treeless Mountain, nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for Best Cinematography.

Director CIARA LACY is an emerging Native Hawaiian film director and experienced producer whose films reflects her ethos: community-oriented and place-based. Her first feature Out of State (PBS, 2019) is a riveting look inside a for-profit Arizona prison which holds incarcerated Native Hawaiian men who practice hula and traditional chant behind prison walls.