Arkana

A graphic encounter with the world of sex trafficking and child prostitution in the United States and how America continues to contribute to the proliferation of slavery inside and out side its boarders.

A unique documentary that takes audiences to Hana, a close-knit, isolated town on the east coast of Maui known as "The Last Hawaiian Place." There we meet Monyca Byrne Wickey and Lipoa Kahaleuahi, two native girls who have grown up taking hula lessons, hiking to secret pools, surfing, and learning traditional Hawaiian values. Theirs has been an idyllic upbringing, but both face the same challenge: they've grown up in paradise, but what will be next? Lipoa, who has chosen to attend college on the mainland, returns for the summer to try to heal a rift in her family and bond again with her father, so that she may return to school in the fall with a sense of wholeness. After her high school graduation (in a class of only 24 other students) Monyca watches many of her classmates leaving to go to university, and the pressure is on for her to develop a professional surfing career. In the end, both girls strive to create an adult life in which they remain true to their Hana roots, but develop the strength to move on and become independent. Their quest is deeply informed by Hana's strong power of the land, mana, and by their own inner strength and resilience.

With the deadly fraternity wars among Filipino youth as a starting point, "Kaptiran" becomes a cinematic essay about the filmmaker's hometown of Manila. Blurring fact and film together, it is a bleak, disjointed portrait of a disjointed city; a meditation on its social cancer.

The women drink, have fun, talk, and laugh. And they quarrel, vomit and drive each other into physical and mental states where the distance to violence, terror, disease and death becomes wafer-thin.