This weekend, Puna residents will have another opportunity to live through the harrowing approach of the June 27 lava flow.
“The Pahoa Flow,” a documentary made by Pahoa-area residents Josh Ballauer, Jeremiah Lofgreen and Matt Tavares, will premiere Saturday at Uncle Robert’s Awa Bar in Kalapana.
Having worked on skateboarding films in the past, Ballauer says he’s no stranger to the art form. But when he and fellow Kaohe Homesteads residents found themselves in the path of the lava last year, Ballauer said he began documenting as much as he could. At the time, he said, he didn’t know what he was going to do with all the footage — he just knew it was important to capture.
“We saw this as an absolute, complete historical moment,” he said Thursday. “It was a moment that had to be caught from a local’s point of view.”
The importance of presenting the happenings from a local point of view became especially clear after national and international media sources swarmed Pahoa in October after it appeared the flow might impact homes in town and cross Highway 130.
“The media came, and they did an interview on one of the people that helped with the film, and then we saw the interview on the news, and they portrayed us as something that wasn’t true,” Ballauer said. “Right at that moment we were just like, ‘This is screwed up. We can’t let Pahoa be represented like this. It already has a bad name to begin with, so we need to tell the truth here.’”
The piece, he said, “portrayed Pahoa as being in total fear,” and that just wasn’t the case.
“What other people can see from this is that you can really go through any kind of disaster if your community comes together,” he said. “As we were shooting this film, we couldn’t believe the amount of aloha that came out in the community. It was so prevalent, this awakening of aloha. Everybody’s about to lose everything, basically … but people were not living in fear. People were kind of like having a celebration.”
Lofgreen, who narrates the film and wrote the story line, said that he and his partners specifically made the documentary for the people of Pahoa.
“The story was for the people living here,” he said.
“We knew there was a story here no matter what happened. We saw our community falling apart, and then witnessed them coming together, and that’s what motivated us to make the film.”
As Pahoa residents, the crew had a unique insight into the community, as well as access to people and places other filmmakers may not have been able to capture.
“We had a lot of access to intimate situations, to things really no one else was going to be able to capture,” Lofgreen said.
The documentary relies on footage of the filmmakers’ own experiences, as well as interviews with about 30 Pahoa-area residents.
The first, free public showing will be at 7 p.m. Saturday at Uncle Robert’s Awa Bar, and a second showing is being planned for the Akebono Theater Oct. 24, following the Puna Resiliency Block Party, which will celebrate one year since the flow came to a halt.
DVD copies of the documentary will be available for $20 in various stores around town.
Email Colin M. Stewart at cstewart@hawaiitribune-herald.com.
