This is an exciting time for those of us on the Chasing Rainbows creative and production team. We have our first major showings at an international film festival – The HIFF in Honolulu next month. (See our schedule). And we will be conducting a Chasing Rainbows Forum on Civil Unions and Civil Rights at the University of Hawaii on October 29th. The event will be hosted by Dan Boylan, whose most certainly Hawaii’s leading political pundit. And as you can see by being on our website we are engaging in a major way to reach out to everyone who wants to have a voice regarding these issues to participate in our social media. Because we feel that the issues need to be talked about, so we are offering safe spaces to discuss the issues.
Yesterday evening my cinematographer Peter Tang from the film and I went to pay a visit to the folks at Honolulu Civil Beat. The purpose of the visit was to show the management and staff a private screening of Chasing Rainbows. Their offices in the Kaimuki district of Honolulu were open, spacious and very casual.
In fact it didn’t feel like the typical high pressure journalistic or broadcast environment that I was used to… it was a fresh breath of air.
The staff was all young and politically astute. After all, they have been following the civil unions battle in Hawaii with a personal in depth approach that sort of parallels our involvement with these issues that we covered in making Chasing Rainbows. After brief introductions we played the film for them.
Even though the folks at Honolulu Civil Beat, were intimately familiar with the issues, and most all of the people we portrayed in the film and perhaps more than most journalists could be, I think that for many of them their reaction to seeing Chasing Rainbows was typical. By typical I mean I haven’t seen anyone yet who’s not challenged by the film to ask a lot of questions at the very least. And for some folks, no matter what their worldview I think the most appropriate term would be “conflicted” or maybe even “bothered”. One individual pointed out that he was very pro-civil unions but after seeing the film it left him with questions that he had never even considered. My thought was “good the film is doing its job – it’s making the viewer think and think deeply”. We’ve seen exactly the same thing happen with people who opposed civil unions or same sex marriage, it made them see issues and the other side as well.
It’s always interesting as a filmmaker to observe exactly what people react to in a film you made. The opening few minutes of Chasing Rainbows certainly has a lot of graphic images, humorous set-ups, historical nuances and the like about homosexuality, religion and a number of other interrelated topics. And many of the sound bites from people we interviewed are dramatic and even funny. But the film also comes at you very quickly and our use of motion graphics to illustrate certain key ideas or thoughts moves by very fast.
The folks at Honolulu Civil Beat really keyed in on a lot more of the subtle and quick bits of visual humor and drama we have implanted in the film.
There’s one point in the film where I can usually expect for most people to laugh, but they didn’t. Instead they caught onto a lot more of the deeper serious issues that underlie in the film: like the role of church in the state, which we represent graphically in few places.
Our discussion after the film was lively and very open. I felt like I bared my soul to these folks last night. Because, I think it’s important to be transparent. In making a film like Chasing Rainbows, I’ve assumed a serious amount of responsibility in being true to the purpose of the film itself and to the people involved in the issues on both sides of those issues to present them each fairly.
We had arrived there at about 5:30 and we left sometime after 8:00PM.
There’s a lot of content in the film and they like any other viewers will likely need an adequate amount of time to process it all, digest it and move forward.
But we left on a very positive beat that we would see what we at Chasing Rainbows can do with Honolulu Civil Beat down the road. And that road is about to get busy. Very busy!