ABOUT THE PROJECT

Production began in 2007 on the Big Island with a handful of interviews with elderly congregation members and several priests. During that first shoot we spent a couple of days in Pahala with the Friday Morning Crew (AKA: Pahala Boyz) at Pahala Hongwanji. And the time we spent in Pahala really opened up our eyes to the situation of many temples, especially in smaller towns on the outer islands. In Kohala, we interviewed most of the 7 or 8 active members of the Jodo mission there. We question arose: what will happen to this temple when these 8 members stop attending the church?

This has long been the question Lorraine Minatoishi-Palumbo has been asking. She wrote her Ph.D. dissertation on the Japanese Buddhist temples of Hawaii and was well aware of the downward trajectory of the congregation membership.

As the production of the film began building steam and these difficult questions were asked, what we found was that across the board, the temples were extremely generous and open and its members were surprisingly candid and truthful. While Buddhism was and still is central to the life of the Japanese communities in Hawaii, it is also going through a transformation: a transformation that we discovered started when it arrived in Hawaii in the 1890s.

During our research we discovered about 10 reels of color 16mm film. Many reels were in very bad condition. With a small grant from the Hawaii Council for the Humanities we restored and transferred all of the film we discovered. The images that we discovered on those reels are truly remarkable and we are very happy to share them with you in this film.

Available on Amazon.com
Available now on Amazon.com

CREDITS

PRESENTED by RADIANT FEATURES
DIRECTED by BILL FEREHAWK and DYLAN ROBERTSON
PRODUCED by LORRAINE MINATOISHI-PALUMBO
EDITED by RADIANT FEATURES

 

SPONSORS

Hawaii Architectural Foundation
Hawaii Council for the Humanities
Hawaii Community Foundation
Atherton Family Foundation
Cooke Foundation
A&B Foundation
WCIT Architecture
Minatoishi Architects
Swinerton Builders
Central Pacific Bank

BACKGROUND IMAGE: SUNRISE PRAYERS, 1949