Telling Hawaiian Stories through Film with Justyn Ah Chong

Wild Ideas Worth Living

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4.7 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 10 October 2023

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Hawaiian filmmaker, Justyn Ah Chong, focuses his work on telling the stories of his people. A few months ago, Justyn won a regional Emmy for a short film, Pili Ka Moʻo. The movie follows a native Hawaiian family as they fight to protect the land where their ancestors are buried.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hawaii holds a special place in my heart. My grandma lived on a Wahoo from my entire childhood,
0:10.8	and I grew up visiting her regularly. In pop culture, we often see the side of Hawaii that
0:16.0	features its stunning beaches and fancy resorts. But these islands have a tumultuous history,
0:21.7	and the native language and culture is sometimes overlooked. Hawaiian filmmaker,
0:27.2	Justin O'Chong, focuses his work on telling the stories of his people. A few months ago,
0:32.9	Justin won a regional Emmy for his short film, Pili Kamo. The movie follows a native Hawaiian
0:39.2	family as a fight to protect the land where their ancestors are buried. Justin has been
0:44.2	capturing stories from his community for most of his life. He was pretty young when he realized
0:49.5	the value of celebrating and sharing his Hawaiian heritage. I'm Shelby Stenger, and this is
0:56.8	Wild Ideas Worth Living, an REI Co-op Studios production. Justin O'Chong, welcome to Wild Ideas
1:06.6	Worth Living. Thank you. Thank you for having me. I love that you initially greeted me with a
1:11.9	loha. Thank you. I feel very blessed and very fortunate to come from Hawaii to come from native
1:19.3	Hawaiian ancestry, and our language is extremely beautiful. Almost completely died out at one point,
1:25.1	but grateful with the efforts of lots of folks in our community over the last 40 years,
1:31.9	there's been a beautiful revitalization of our of our language and of our culture. So
1:38.3	alloha nui, alloha. Nice to meet you. So you grew up in Hawaii. What was it like growing up there,
1:44.3	and then how did you get into film? Yeah, so for me, I born and raised here in Hawaii. I feel like I
1:51.6	had a pretty blessed and privileged life. I grew up with my parents and my younger brother,
1:58.8	my family, my parents didn't know too much about Hawaiian culture, didn't know Hawaiian language,
2:04.3	neither did my grandparents, and those are really the lasting effects of generations of
2:10.9	American colonization and the intentional actions to wipe out those things from our people.
2:18.4	And so for me, I was in seventh grade when I first started taking Hawaiian language courses,
	...

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