 Okay, we're back, we're live on Community Matters. We're talking about art today, we're talking about the art of filmmaking today with Hema Del Barrio. Wait, Hema. Cubero. Cubero Del Barrio. Del Barrio, let me roll it off my tongue. Hema, Cubero Del Barrio. You got it. If you didn't know, that's a Spanish name because she was born and raised in and around Madrid. She's a madrile, no? Welcome back to the show, Hema. Thank you for having me. Great to have you. Last time we spoke, it was what, a couple of years ago? Was it that long ago? And you were doing a thing on Cheesecake. You were doing a documentary film on Cheesecake in Kaimuki. Yes. You wanna talk about that? How did it go since we spoke? I made a wonderful piece about a wonderful man called Otto that has his business in Kaimuki now, Otto Cake. And I think I came here when we were about to go to the Hawaii International Film Festival. Yeah. It was really fun. It was kind of like a homecoming because Otto has always been in Honolulu. And then the film show at the Doris Duke Theater and also in San Francisco at the Roxy Theater. So yeah, it was really lovely. You like making films, you really do. And you are so creative and intense about it. How did you get involved in filmmaking? You know, I don't have anybody in my family that comes from film. But I knew when I was a young girl that I wanted to tell stories. So my entryway was journalism. Actually, I became a journalist. I went to journalism school in Madrid and I came to the US. I ended up in North Carolina. And that school allowed me to kind of starting to grab the camera and so on. But it was really in San Francisco years later when I moved to San Francisco and I met Lourdes Portillo, this Mexican filmmaker, that I started working on a film about the killings of women in Mexico called Señoritas Traviada. And I remember you talked about that. And that I realized then in the desert in Juarez that that's what I wanted to do. But that was kind of my calling. So what's, yes, calling. I, indeed, I totally, I feel that, yeah. What's your like philosophy about film? You like to do documentaries. You like true stories. What kind of true stories do you like? I like reality. I feel like I don't need to make anything up. I just feel like reality is pretty larger than fiction. And maybe because I come from journalism and I had very intense initial experiences, I really love working with people. I love the fact that you start with an idea and you don't know where it's gonna take you. I think that for me, documentary really opens me up. If I didn't have documentary, my life would probably be very small. So through documentary, I get to live the life of others. But I also know now that every time I'm doing a life about somebody else, I'm doing something about myself. I feel like we are all like mirrors. I'm always constantly learning about other people and also about myself. We're all like mirrors. Sometimes you're all like what you see. And that's gonna be on the final exam, yeah. Okay, so now let's talk about Puka Puka. And I love the title of the film, Our Atol Speaks. Which also we use the Puka Puka title, which is intentional. And it's called Tala Tala Mai To Ma To Wenua. And Puka Puka is one of the islands atolls in the northern group of the Kuka Islands. The Kuka Islands is a nation of 15 islands. And this is, if you have to place it geographically, it's closer to Samoa, but there's no transportation. There's very rare transportation that goes through Puka Puka. And Puka Pukaans have their own language that is separate from the other ones. The rural language? There's not a lot of people in Puka Puka, yeah. No, right now I think there's around like 450 people living there. But there is a great deal of migration. So there is most Puka Pukaans live outside of Puka Puka. So they migrate mainly to New Zealand and Australia. So why Puka Puka? Of all the places in the world? I know. I know. I have never heard of that place. But like about 14 years ago, I met a woman, Amelia Borofsky, who is the daughter of an anthropologist, Robert Borofsky. And she grew up in this atoll. She was taken there when she was one year old until she was like four and a half. And she started telling me about this place that she didn't know if it was real or not real. And then a few years later, I started this project about this place Puka Puka, her life, and also the life of Johnny Frisbee, who is another Puka Puka woman that grew up there. So some stories have come to me because I've read it in the news. This film that I've been working for seven years. That's your imagination, being your guide, yeah. Well, this film just entered my life and I didn't think it was gonna be a film. So this is films called Homecoming and I've been working on it for seven years. Seven years. And that's what, what was my entry point to Puka Puka? But aside from the people and looking at what it is, what Puka Puka is, how it's come to be, you have intertwined the whole notion of climate change and sea level rise. So it becomes very real and very, very current. Yeah, so you know, when I work on films, one of my challenges, or I don't know, it could be a virtue too, is that I don't make a film just about one thing. So Puka Puka is an amazing, rich place. So my feature length film, Homecoming, that I'm finishing now, is about the two women and this atoll. When I was there, I realized this is such a rich place and like many other atolls in the Pacific, is of course affected by climate change. But what's really unique about Puka Puka is that Puka Puka is outside of the capitalist system. It's its own culture and society and they have been practicing conservation techniques with nature for more than 2000 years. In 2017, I was working on Homecoming and I needed to go back to film and we got funding from the UNDP Environmental Fund that is a fund of the United Nations. And they gave me money to go to Puka Puka and what I needed to do in return was give them a deliverable of a short film about climate change. But I just thought it was just a deliverable. And then what I realized after spending six months there is that oh my God, these people have so much to offer and I'm gonna make an hour and a half film and I have so much material. So our atoll speaks comes out of filming more than 450 hours and choosing the knowledge that people have around nature and climate change. So our atoll speaks is really about climate change but not with this kind of like what is it called, catastrophic look at climate change but more from the place of like, what do indigenous people, what do Puka Pukans have to offer to us to be in nature and to live more of our respect for them? We can learn from them, we should learn from them. That's the feeling that I got. The feeling that I got is like, wow, this is such a rich place and we didn't wanna make a film that was like, you know, everything is going to disappear. I mean, Puka Puka will disappear in less than 100 years if we don't do anything about climate change. The place is really a communal film that I did with the Puka Pukan people with Johnny with Amelia. Do you run a camera? I do, I mean, I do but I also like to work with other people. So when you watch this film you will see some of my footage, you will see some of the footage of Vicente Franco, who is a really fantastic cinematographer and what really makes me happy is that the most gorgeous footage, which is the drone footage of the island. Ah, drones. It's fantastic. I was shot all by a Puka Pukan men, Coletinga, that had a drone when I got there. I got him an extra battery so we could actually get away more than 15 minutes and it's really breathtaking. So he's a cinematographer of the piece and it's really a stunning- Let's look at some clips, Emma. Okay, we got three or four clips that go through them and then you can explain each one as we finish it. Let's look at the first one. We are the children of the Oulu of the Watu of Puka Puka. As its caretakers, we listen to the moon and to the tides. At the Waivolo, thank you for looking after us. Russell, the coconut fronds. Fish for you, Merma's the sea. A father will teach his son the ways of the ocean. A mother will teach her daughter the ways of the land. We have three ecological food reserves. Motukko, Motukotawa, and Motuuta. Motukko has the fattest blue coconut crabs. Motukotawa has the juiciest flying seabirds. Motuuta has the freshest coconuts. Well, beautiful people, beautiful land, beautiful shots. So tell us about that clip. So that is the beginning of the film and the film starts with a myth of how Puka Puka was created. They believe that they come from a rock and it's a really beautiful myth. So we start with that and then which is going to explain some of the conservation practices. And what I really wanna emphasize is that when you hear the voice, the voice is the voice of Johnny Frisbee, who is this amazing woman that lives in Manoa and she's like a Puka Puka legend. Her father was Robert Dean Frisbee, was the man that introduced Puka Puka to the world. So what we did is like, as I said before, we took, I have all these interviews, we took the lines out of the interviews. The lines that talked about conservation and nature and climate change. And then we rewrote it a little bit so we'll have a narration form. And then Johnny Frisbee is the person that is actually narrating the film. So it's really, I cannot emphasize this enough, it's really not me making the film, it's really like Puka Puka's telling you what they have, what they do daily. Yeah, you're carving the statuette of the marble. Yeah, I think film is about a sculpture in action. Especially if you have 4,500 hours, you have a lot of carving to do. Okay, let's look at the second clip. The council of important people decides what and when to harvest. This is the lousy, the rules that decide when the villagers can gather and when to leave the land to replenish itself. If a child runs into the bush and grabs a small coconut crab by its back, a parent will say, don't kill the babies, let it go until it's big enough to fill your stomach. Next year it will be ready for meal. People connected to the land understand life's rhythms. Conserve now, eat later. Beautiful life, a remote life, a simple life, a sweet life, lay back to the integrino. And they do actually a lot of work because they have to maintain the island. It's fishing and hunting society too. I mean, you get food from the boat and now they have solar power, they have internet, I mean, they're really in the world in the way that they want to be in the world. But it's definitely, they are following conservation practices, fishing practices, hunting practices for more than thousands of years. The clip that you saw reminded me of the fact that the knowledge is passed from generation to generation. So the grandparents teach their grandkids and that's how the knowledge is passed. Or oral history. Oral history and doing. I mean, they're really laid back. One of the things that I learned about from them is just to be more grateful and more joyful because they do really enjoy life. But they do work a lot. Like, they have a very sophisticated system. If you got into Puka Puka, they will get you in a group of men and every morning for a certain amount of hours you will have to do community work and go and hunt coconuts and get up to the trees and, I mean, and go fishing to feed everybody. I mean, it's really an alive place. If there's a lot of order. The benefit of the community. Everything, you know, you will never go hungry there. They actually include you, if you got there, they will say, okay, we're gonna give J like a caveo or two caveos or certain amount of fish or taro. So fishing and taro are the main things. And also the coconut tree. Instead of drinking water, we drink coconut. Really liked being there, didn't you? It was amazing. Let's look at the third clip, Emma. Our atto speaks. Kutala tala mai yuki tomato whenua. How long can we go Puka Puka, the island home? Climate change is the biggest threat to our existence. We need to look at the risk of rising seas in terms of our cultural practices so that we don't lose them. We cannot allow Puka Puka to disappear into a legend of Tamade and Mataliki. Like the way Kerepasi and Tuvalu and other islands in the Pacific disappear into the sea. If Puka Puka goes under the sea, we are all under the sea. My umbilical cord is buried here. If that goes underneath, that is literally me going under the sea. We pray the international community can do something so that I don't go underwater. Beautiful, Emma. It's a beautiful place. It's really the Pacific Pacific. So I had no big waves, no surfing, I'm sorry to say. No, no surfing. And a lot of the movie is an exploration of the place and the people as an exquisite example of something we haven't seen. Something that we haven't seen and something that we could learn from. Yeah, that's the feeling that I got and that they have so much to offer. In order to make this movie, you really had to understand it. You had to observe it, you had to participate in it. You had to engage with the people. You had to see the whole place. I could have never done this film without them. So definitely, yeah. You cannot get to Puka Puka. They will not let you in if you haven't followed the protocols. And I felt really lucky because with Johnny and Amelia, they were like daughters of Puka Puka so I was able to go in and they really welcomed me and they treated me like their own. So I feel really fantastic. Tomorrow there's gonna be like, the film has gone to New Zealand. We premiered there. It was fantastic because most Puka Puka's live in the diaspora in New Zealand so we did the screenings there and tomorrow the film is gonna premiere for the first time at the Kuki Airani film festival in the Cook Islands and we have organized that the Puka Puka people will do a performance of their own, you know, drumming and dancing and then the film is opening the festival. So that's kind of amazing to me because this film is about them. And then it will show on Cook Islands' television right after. So we've seen what, three clips so far. Now we're gonna see the trailer. And the trailer is, how is the trailer different than the clips you've shown us? So as you heard in the clips, you know, you can hear the voice of Johnny Frisbee because the clip are sections of the film. The trailer, what I wanted to do was really to take you there in a kind of like a magical place. There's only a couple of lines or at all speak, you know, at the very end. And I think a quote about climate change. So the film is really the message has an urgent message of if this place, if we don't do something, if the international community doesn't do anything about climate change, we will go under and I will die with it. My umbilical cord will be buried there. So that was to me when I was trying to make a film with, when I was trying to make the trailer with my editor, Keon Lee, who is my collaborator, I was very intentional about, I wanna make sure that the wave is there and that there is a short message that is about climate change. But I also wanted to take you to this kind of like real place. It's magical, but it's real. Okay, let's see the trailer now. We are the children of the Ulu Ote Watu. How long can we call Pukupuku the island home? Climate change is the biggest threat to our existence. Our atoll speaks. Kotalatala Mayuki Tomato Inua. That's pretty, that's pretty inviting, Hema, that really is. I wanted to mention, I forgot about the music that you hear in the trailer. So that is a recording that was done by a man that was there in the 1970s, Kevin Salisbury, who's actually helping me now with the translation of the Pukupuku and he recorded that song. And the music in Pukupuku is exquisite, like the acapella music. Homecoming, I'm gonna have really amazing music on the place, but I wanted, that is the national, that is the Pukupuku anthem. It gives me chicken skin every time I hear it. And that was very intentional to play that throughout the film. Are you gonna go back? Are you gonna go? Yeah, I made a, so when this film premiered in New Zealand the day before, I promised them that they will see the work before anybody else. I couldn't go there because there's no transport. It costs, you have to charge it up late to get there if you want to, which I did to return for my first shoot. But we organized a screening in Pukupuku. So the world premiere happened in Pukupuku. You know how in film festivals, you have to go to Sundance or Berlin? So we did it the opposite way. We started in Pukupuku. Did they like it? Oh yeah, it was very sweet. And intentionally, I put everybody in the ending credits of the film. So when you get to the end, I said, can you send me the names of everybody? So they gave me 450 names by village, by area, and also listed by men, women, and children. So I have a really long list of credits, but it makes me so happy. Then film is forever. And I think there's something about seeing your name on the screen that is kind of like, okay, well. And at some point, I can make some decisions. So it was really fun to put everybody there. Yeah, well, I hope you can go back for a long time because you may not be able to. I know, and I do want to, yeah, when I finish the feature length, I would like to go back and yeah, I mean, yeah, I definitely will go back. You know, this place was, may I say, made for you. And on the other side, you were made for it. Married you to person in a place. Well, you know, I am from, I come from, I don't come from water, I don't come from the Pacific. I come from a very, very small town, actually, north of Madrid, Medina del Campo, or San Pablo de la Moraleja, and it's very, very rural. When I was in Pucapuca and I was walking through the streets of Pucapuca, there's only one main street, I felt like I was home in my father's hometown. So that was like, I was like, what is this about? Because I was surrounded by that beautiful water and the palm trees, and definitely that's not Castilla. That's not Spain. But I feel like by making this film, the places really, and the people have really given me a huge gift. Yeah, aren't you worried, though, that making a film, because a film is media, a film is publicizing things? If this film, or I should say, when this film, you know, hits the market, so to speak, then wins a lot of awards, people will go to Pucapuca, won't they? Aren't you afraid that Pucapuca is a fragile place and it's easily tampered with, it's easily damaged? So my intention with this film was to make something that will serve them. So Pucapuca is a very sophisticated society. They have a tribal system, a government system. Everybody gives their manako or their advice. So while I was making the film, everybody was informed about it and I know that they don't want to be developed. They have development, they have solar power, they function really well and it's really going to be up to them what they want to do with the impact of the film. I don't want Pucapuca to change, you know? But it's really gonna be, it's gonna be their call. I am just, I feel like as a filmmaker, I'm just a vehicle to share a message but then it's really their call, what they want to do with it. For instance, can they get better transportation for their own people? That could be a good thing, for their own people. Do they want to make hotels? They have to manage it. Just like Hawaii has to manage it. Every island community has to manage these things. I really look forward to the film to showing Hawaii because I've spent enough time in Hawaii to understand a little bit the richness of the culture and when I was in Pucapuca, I remember I was filming the creation of a pola house, of a kikau house and one of the guys came to me after hours of film and I said like, Emma, what do you think? They will think of Hawaii, of how we make homes here. And I said, Paris, your work will be in a museum. It will be at the Bishop Museum, you know? I think they have so much to offer and my hope, if they want to and they do want to, is that when the film premieres here, there could be some kind of like cultural exchange or that was really, it's a true Polynesian world. So where are we on the continuum of releasing this film? They have a premiere. They went to New Zealand to a film festival and you just came back, just came back from New Zealand. I just came back, so now... How did that go and what follows? Oh, it was really beautiful because, you know, so this deliverable became a film and then I was like, wait a minute, I talked to the fund and I said, could you give me some time? I own the film, but because of the UN, they wanted to make it publicly available to everybody. But you know how the film festival world works? I said, can you give me some time before I make it public for everybody to really take it to festivals? So I was intentionally going to New Zealand because of the diaspora. I want the film to keep showing in New Zealand, to keep showing Australia because that's where most Puka Pukaans live. We, it's gonna show here in Hawaii soon. I cannot tell you where, but maybe I can come back a little bit later in the year. You must let us know. So it's gonna be really available, but I cannot say where yet. Just yet, okay. And so my intention was that part of the world that understands, you know, the Pacific, New Zealand, Australia, Hawaii, and then go East, you know, hopefully premier also in Europe and in the US. Yes, I hope so. I'm with you on that. And then the film will be available. I think it's a really, it will be a really great educational tool. We want to create like an outreach campaign. We're really doing it like an educational plan because the film, I think, can just be used a lot in the educational market. You've alluded to, you know, what the film is intended to show. You've alluded to the kind of reaction you expect, but in a larger sense, film is media, film is communication. A film like this, especially with the sensitive issues involved and the threatening issues involved, will have an effect on people because it will show them, you know, like the end of the world. I mean, the last place, it will show them how beautiful that can be. It will show them in a nostalgic sense, in the sense of loss, what we have, we all of us have lost over the last few hundred years. You know, how would you like them? What kind of effect would you like to see happen from the film you've made, put so much time into? What kind of effect would you like? What would you like people to really take away and act on, act on, because they've seen this film? I feel like my role as a filmmaker is to shed light onto realities that already exist. Puka Puka has been there for thousands of years. So I happen to be lucky to make this film. I want people to understand that this is a very rich, sophisticated place that we can learn from, that we could maybe start being more conscious about conservation practices, about how not to waste, you know, food, about how to be more respectful with each other and with nature, how we can learn from grandparents and, you know, your parents and how knowledge can be transferred to generations. About family. Family, you know. But I want, I mean, it gives me a lot of pride to know that Puka Puka are gonna have these films about them because there's not a, what's happening tomorrow in the Cook Island is historical because they've never been documented by a film. So it's true, the beauty of film is that it lasts forever. So I think it will just, I just want you to be like immersed in it and then that you care more about climate change that you could actually, we'll create a lesson plan and an impact campaign so you actually can watch the film and then do something about it. Immersed may be a very appropriate word because Sea Little Rise is rising and the film may last longer than Puka Puka lasts. Yeah, it's hard to say, but yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well, this is a great contribution. I'm so glad you came to talk to us about it. Yeah, thank you for having me. I always love talking with you. It's very funny. The same thing, Hema. Hema Kubero Del Barrio, film maker. Thank you so much. Thank you very much.