MELE MURALS

Directed by Tadashi Nakamura

Asian American Panorama / USA / 2016 / Documentary / 64 mins / English / DCP

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Watch Trailer

MELE MURALS

La Paloma Theatre
Saturday, November 12, 2016 3:25 pm

Description

Official Selection, 2016 CAAMFest

Four years after his award-winning film Jake Shimabukuro: Life on Four Strings (SDAFF ’12), director Tadashi Nakamura returns with another stellar look into the realm of art and music with his latest, MELE MURALS, a documentary celebrating the marriage between traditional Hawaiian culture and contemporary graffiti—on the surface a surprising match, but the beauty of art often resides in its paradoxical tendencies: to be both hot and cold, both wet and dry, both hardened on the outside and yet totally soft in the core.

Nobody embodies these two contradictory forces more than Estria Miyashiro and John “Prime” Hina, both prominent street artists who in the past have fervently resisted their native Hawaiian identity in favor of artfully defacing the side of a building with spray paint. When the two realize that art and expression provide a wide enough berth to do both, they collaborate to head a community workshop at a charter school in the picturesque town of Waimea, Hawaii. What ensues is a magical, ephemeral moment in which past and future generations of artists band together to portray gorgeous renditions of river spirits and towering celestial bodies, creating a transcendent space for the community to gather and explore their roots—both individually and collectively, both inwardly and outwardly. –Thomas Jin