WAIMEA — Earlier this fall, Parker School launched the Culture Conscious Cinema series on campus. It features monthly films as an approach to understand race, ethnicity, class and gender; how these things intersect with one another in the culture and history of the United States; and how the entertainment industry represents these ideas to the public over time.
As Dr. Angela Alforque, performing arts director at the school and leader of this series stated, “Those of us living in Hawaii are geographically and, in many ways, culturally detached from the social and political conflicts that have reawakened on the mainland in the past few years, and particularly in the last few months. I hope these films will contribute to developing our collective vocabulary about cultural issues and continuing a critical dialogue in an open, safe, shared space.”
Open to the public, the next documentary will be “The Hawaiian Room” to be shown at 3:30 p.m. this Friday in the Parker School Theatre. From 1937 until 1966, hundreds of dancers, singers and musicians from Hawaii became part of the incredible legacy of the Hawaiian Room, located at The Hotel Lexington in the heart of New York City. Over the course of three decades, The Room became an incomparable venue through which aloha and Hawaiian culture were shared in vibrant New York City.
The film by Ann Marie N. Kirk was produced by Hula Preservation Society. Admission is free.
Future showings now through February can be found on the Parker School website at http://www.parkerschoolhawaii.org/sites/default/files/cultureconsciouscinema_2017_18.pdf.