From Sundance: ‘Every Day in Kaimukī’: A Meditative Love Letter to a Neighborhood and its Community

When director Alika Tengan’s first longform feature “Every Day in Kaimukī” premiered at Sundance on Sunday, he told the audience that the project was “a love letter to Honolulu, to Kaimukī, and to the AAPI community here.” Indeed, this unassuming film pulses with a quiet, ruminative love for those communities and the stories they carry. The result is a tender, atmospheric indie that draws on the real lives of its mostly non-professional actors to immerse viewers in the fine-grained world of the titular Hawaiian neighborhood.

The film opens at night, and much of its action continues to take place after the sun sets on O’ahu. Naz (Naz Kawakami, playing an exaggerated version of himself) is a night DJ at a community radio station and spends his daylight hours skating at Kaimukī Park. Though his ties to the neighborhood, and to Hawai’i at large, run deep, he plans to move to New York with his girlfriend Sloane (Rina White), who has been accepted into the ceramics program at the Pratt Institute.

When we meet Naz in the booth, he’s on the air musing on Richard Hell and artistic communities in New York, calling Kaimukī his equivalent of the famed New York bar CBGB. A new DJ-in-training shows up and Naz gives him a hard time for his underbaked musical canon. It’s a modest scene that sets up the thrum of competing forces in Naz’s head — he’s excited by the prospect of proving himself in New York, but wary of relinquishing his comfortable place in the neighborhood that’s formed the contours of his adult life thus far. The film is loosely tentpoled around the arrival of this new DJ and the approaching date of the move, as Naz grapples with his strained relationship with Sloane, his own elusive sense of being “from” a place, and what it might mean to feel at home.

If the plot is light, it’s somewhat besides the point. Naz’s radio show is called “Night Drive,” which would double as an apt title for the movie based solely on vibe. Tengan and cinematographer Chapin Hall wash their mise-en-scène in moody purples and blues, fading sunlight to a warm sepia beige and casting the landscape in a roaming haze. This visual scheme evokes both an affective dreamlike nostalgia and a sense of listless complacency, mirroring Naz’s attachment to what he’s leaving behind as well as the roots of his desire to do so. The camerawork is intimate and lyrical as the film follows Naz’s days around Kaimukī: Like Naz himself, the lens is languid in its movement but meticulous in its attention. An evocative tone poem emerges — of place, of community, of millennial antsiness anchored in a granular tableau.

The score, too, could come straight from the effortlessly cool record shelves of the radio station. Holden Mandrial-Santos — a close collaborator of Tengan’s who also stars in the film as the interloping new DJ Kayden — nails the onscreen melancholia, or rather co-creates it, with a curated playlist of lo-fi tunes that puts indie darlings like Nilüfer Yanya and Tei Shi alongside music from the artistic projects of the actual actors in the film, including Hapa Hunting and Goon Lei Goon. Dashed with Madrial-Santos’ own whimsical compositions, it’s a score fit for a night drive to anywhere.

But this is not a film about anywhere, or anyone. Tengan, the first Native Hawaiian filmmaker to premiere a full-length feature at Sundance, is committed to amplifying the lived experiences of his milieu, and the film’s hyperlocality is both an uncomplicated reflection of a real place — the film was able to shoot in the neighborhood’s actual record stores and parks — and a radical rebuttal of reductive storytelling about the Hawaiian islands that sees only beaches and tourists. (Indeed, neither appears once in the film.)

The cast is also composed largely of neighborhood locals from Naz’s own friend group. Kawakami and Tengan are friends who have long wanted to make a movie together and co-wrote the script, much of which was ultimately improvised on set. The impetus for this version of a shared project was, in fact, the real Naz’s impending move to New York, where he now resides and Zoomed in from for Sundance. The result is an effectively lived-in cinéma vérité, particularly in the improvised scenes of casual conversation. Kawakami has a natural, mellow charisma and commands the screen with ease.

The dearth of professional actors may be a factor for why scripted dialogue is not the film’s strong suit. The atmosphere is harshed, and credibility strained, when the movie demands the most of its stars to advance the plot, notably in tensions between Naz and Sloane. While White does her best to bring multidimensionality to her character — the only female lead — she’s written as somewhat shrill, unreasonable, and even uncompassionate toward her partner, ultimately flattening into a plot device for Naz.

Nonetheless, “Every Day in Kaimukī” is stunning and melodic in its most naturalistic moments, and hopefully marks a breakout for Tengan. When asked if he planned to move to L.A. anytime soon, the director said that there were endlessly more stories he wanted to tell in his hometown first. Lucky for us.
— Staff writer Amelia Roth-Dishy can be reached at amelia.roth-dishy@thecrimson.com and on Twitter at @scallionshmear.