KIPUKA - NEW BEGINNINGS

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“KIPUKA -New Beginnings” is about five abandoned Japanese Cemeteries in Hawaiʻi, and their grave keepers who share the memories, filmed entirely in Hawaiʻi. The story begins with the cemetery of Sentaro Ishii in Kipahulu Maui, a quiet site where the first immigrant from Japan was buried. This film shows the view of life and death, tracing the awareness of human entities surviving amidst repeated loss and elimination. From a cemeteries miraculous survival from lava flow in Pahoa, to the burial ground found in a sugar cane field at the time of the Hawaiʻi Commercial & Sugar Company closure, the film entitled KIPUKA describes as the meaning in Hawaiian, an oasis of vegetation surrounded by lava flow; a place where the seeds of new life spread. The images are connected with panoramic photos, which the director / photographer Ai Iwane visited and shot the sites with a 1930’s classic rotating panoramic camera called Kodak Cirkut.