Dance and fire-knife performances will light up the big screen this Friday as “Sharing Aloha: Dance, Identity, and Hawaii’s Tourism Story” explores the stories of the Polynesian Cultural Center at Brigham Young University-Hawaii.
The documentary highlights the experiences of hundreds of student employees from across the Pacific. In exchange for working 19 hours a week at the Center, the students receive a full ride scholarship—books, housing, meals, and health care.
Director Blair Treu said the focus of the film is on the students themselves.
“We felt like even though we could get kind of in the historical aspects, we wanted to focus on who are these kids? Where do they come from? What are the obstacles that they've got to overcome to get there, to stay there and graduate from there? And that's really kind of how it evolved and what we did,” Treu said.
The film follows students from a nervous freshman to seasoned seniors over the course of a few months as they help produce one of the largest live shows on the island each night.
“If you've been [to the PCC], you're going to be nodding your head, you're going to watch the film and go, ‘Yep, I've seen that, I've seen that.’ And then you see something that's brand new. And you go, ‘Oh, wow, I had no idea that that's what they have to go through. I had no idea that that's what goes on behind the scenes,’” Treu said.
One unique aspect of the PCC performances is the fact that students learn to dance the traditions of cultures beyond their own.
“When you dance the culture of another, you really take it seriously because you want to respect that culture. And that understanding leads to peace, leads to brotherhood, sisterhood,” Treu said. “These kids can come in with tremendous, fierce loyalty to their own village, their own culture. But at the end of the day, because they're at the Polynesian Cultural Center, they become not Fijians and Tahitians and Hawaiians, but they become brothers and sisters and become Polynesians.”
Treu said the crew worked hard to make the film authentic and represent Polynesian culture as it is today.
“If culture does not evolve, it loses relevancy to the current generation and they lose interest,” Treu said. “Every generation adds cultural elements to what the generation before did.”
“Sharing Aloha: Dance, Identity, and Hawaii’s Tourism Story” premieres this Friday. Visit the film’s website to find a screening near you.