| Summary: | Caroline Yacoe, director of Pacific Passages, has worked for over 28 years filming the Pacific and collecting and curating art from the region. This documentary, crafted for Hawaii state-mandated seventh-grade classes in Pacific Island Studies, has received acclaim from a wider audience, receiving the Gold Apple Award for Educational Excellence. Narrated by a young girl of New Guinean descent, the film includes images of cultural artifacts from the collections of the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum and the Honolulu Academy of the Arts, as well as footage of rituals and ceremonies showing how these artifacts are used all over the Pacific. Viewers can compare Hawaiian and Tahitian dance and witness initiation rites from Papua New Guinea. We see geography not just as the study of maps, but the study of how people carve their lives from the land, and how the land in turn shapes their lives. Images of high-rise hotels and skyscrapers in Honolulu are juxtaposed with scenes of people harvesting and processing copra from coconuts, providing a varied introduction to the comparative study of Micronesia, Melanesia, and Polynesia.
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