ULU KUPU

Ulu (ʻŌlelo Hawai'i): “to grow, increase, spread”; Kupu (ʻŌlelo Hawai'i): “to sprout, offspring, germinate” or a “spirit or supernatural being”.

Through video that mixes parallel visual narratives, Ulu Kupu follows a performance of harvesting plants/materials from the 'āina (land): hala which is used for weaving; wauke, which is used to create kapa or tapa, a textile; and hau which is also used as a textile or decorative fiber. This dance with the materials of the land is further expanded through the performance of a dancer, wearing the materials on their body and dancing in a wahi pana (sacred place) as well as in a grove of hau trees. The labor hula is continued in a river, where the materials are cleaned and processed. It commences almost ritualistically, as if the movements were inherited within the performers, each of whom specializes in these crafts. The actions are meant to convey an offering, and akua (elemental deities) are shown watching these actions throughout the film. The film aims to convey that all of this ike (knowledge) is in fact inherited by all Kānaka, and that all it takes is a remembering. Through the transference of ike through the medium of film, a remembrance is offered to the viewer.

This film takes the viewer into the Wā; the liminal space between the spiritual and the physical, to access the intuitive realm. When we enter the water or forest and put our consciousness into this realm, this is the way of going into the wā. While opening ourselves to experience the elements as teachers, we allow the wā to connect us to the mana of the land and the rocks of the ahupua’a; and an understanding of balance and respect for every living thing.

Performers move with an energy that is collective of the ‘āina, and the waters that connect every living body. The dance teaches us to remember each other's past, our ancestor’s pasts, and to be present for the gift of each moment. Our continued evolution happens every night in our sleep, in the pō - the deep darkness of chaos and creative potential inside of our unconscious. Futures start as dreams, as Wā.

Credits:
Directed by: Tiare Ribeaux and Jody Stillwater
Written by: Tiare Ribeaux, Nanea Lum, Jody Stillwater
DP: Jody Stillwater
Cast: Nanea Lum, Lise Michelle, Kālikopuanoheaokalani, Ara Laylo, Waikapu (Noah Harders)
Flower Masks/Botanicals: Waikapu
Sound Mixing: Jody Stillwater
Styling: Tiare Ribeaux, Lise Michelle
Editing: Tiare Ribeaux and Jody Stillwater

Special Thanks to:
Manoa Heritage Center, TRADES AIR, UH Manoa Admiral Residency, and the Citizen Diplomacy Action Fund

TIARE RIBEAUX

Tiare Ribeaux is a kānaka maoli filmmaker, writer, and artistic director based between Honolulu and Oakland. She founded B4BEL4B in 2014 as a platform and community space in Oakland to prioritize critically underrepresented artists in moving image and media arts, and has worked as an artistic director there and at various media arts festivals for the past 8 years.

As a filmmaker, she has made multiple short films that explore the interfacing of our human bodies with different technologies and the environment, while imagining more regenerative futures through an indigenous lens. Born and raised on O’ahu, and having lived in the Hawaiian diaspora for over a decade in the Bay Area, her recent film work is centered on her return home and a reclamation of her heritage as Kānaka Maoli. She is interested in telling stories that include the modern indigenous experience, while layering in components of Polynesian science fiction and Hawaiian futurism. 

Her filmmaking style involves a magical realist exploration of spirituality, labor, and the natural environment, drawing upon the structure of dreamworlds and Hawaiian cosmology to critique both social and ecological imbalances.

She has shown work both nationally and internationally, and has won numerous grants and awards for her artistic leadership including the Sundance Interdisciplinary Program Grant, two New and Experimental Works Grants from the Kenneth Rainin Foundation, the Building Demand for the Arts Grant from the Doris Duke Foundation, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Citizen Diplomacy Action Fund from the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, the Zellerbach Family Foundation, and the Center for Cultural Innovation, among others.

JODY STILLWATER

Jody Stillwater 周青海 is a writer and director from the San Francisco Bay Area. His film and interdisciplinary project themes are based in dream logic and tactile reality, with a modern/transforming approach to visual semiotics & archetype, grounded in Eastern rhizomatic systems and Western classical narrative. His cultural background as a Chinese/Norwegian/Cherokee-American amidst colliding waves of post-temporal diaspora and arhythmic, intertidal class structures has influenced a value of justice, representation and the ethereal, and allowed him to express these values in experimental film, immersive installation and narrative cinema.

He has been a finalist for the SFFILM Kenneth Rainin Screenwriting Grant and has screened his films at the De Young Museum, YBCA, Mutek, ISEA 2019 South Korea, Marfa Film Festival, Choreoscope Int’l Dance Film Festival in Barcelona, Rockefeller’s Imagine Science Film Festival, Denver Film Festival, Bucharest Int’l Dance Film Festival, Copenhagen Fashion Film Festival, directed films for Meta/Facebook, Google, Facebook, Knotel, Bentley Mills, performed & installed multiple new media projects at Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, Tribeca Film Festival Hacks Lab, the San Francisco Dance Film Festival Co-Lab, appeared as a featured guest on Asian Pacific America with Robert Handa on NBC and was selected as the featured film artist at APAture 2018. He has received grants from the Kenneth Rainin Foundation, Zellerbach Family Foundation and Fleischhacker Foundations.

Stillwater is also a location sound recordist, and films he has recorded have screened at Sundance, Edinburgh Film Festival, SXSW, Chicago International, Tribeca and SFIFF. He has made films in the Netherlands, Colombia, Austria, India, Chile, Slovenia, the UK and across the United States.