We were lucky to catch up with Dr. Lani Cupchoy recently and have shared our conversation below.
Dr. Lani, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.
One of the most rewarding experiences I have received is leaping into the Indie Filmmaking world. I did not go to a fancy film school – I learned camera work, editing, audio work, music production, etc, along the way through colleagues, tutorials and lots of ‘working through the process’ on my own. I turned from oral history interviewing for my academic work to filmmaking and fell in love with this format instantly because of its emotionally engaging appeal to audiences. I began with Truth Seekers (2016), a film that looks at how Fifth graders and their teacher from Bell Gardens Elementary took on the California State Capitol and successfully championed the passage of AB 146 requiring that the unconstitutional deportations of Mexican-Americans be included in textbooks. I then served as writer-producer-executive producer for Urban Seeds (2017), which highlights the story of a school-based garden movement’s extraordinary passion and fight for food justice in urban Los Angeles and how this grassroots program transformed their neighborhoods and schools into healthier communities becoming the first of its kind in the United States. During the pandemic, I launched Food Medicine (2020), a story that captured my personal story with my mother as we experimented with undervalued home garden methods to grow and share fresh healthy abundant produce with family, neighbors, and friends. Next Aloha Soul Food (2022) explored decolonial foodways through the family life stories of six Pacific Island women. Set in Los Angeles, California, the documentary embodies an intergenerational love story to working class women deeply rooted in Hawaii while skillfully examining a century of how they navigated through the Chinese exclusion Acts, the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom, 1960s school cafeterias, the United Public Workers Strike in 1979, and the Women’s Army Core. The film shows how generations can reclaim identity and historical spaces through recipes while reminding us of the deep ties that bind our families and communities together. My most recent documentary, Islandtrification (2023), documents the journey of Kānaka Maoli families resisting predatory gentrification on Maui, Hawaii, which has a deep history of displacing locals due to economic development-agribusiness and remains the prime spot for the world elite to build their multimillion-dollar estates. All of these projects are award winners and are meaningful to me as I continue to build social justice based work that supports a global community.
Dr. Lani, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
As CEO, I have spent the last two decades building my company Pinkjade Creations, an education-based enterprise that houses my projects, collaboration and creative spirit. I am ultimately a social justice storyteller ‘artivista’ (artist-activist) in which filmmaking, visual art-multimedia, as well as music and dance production, allows me to connect to community. For me, filmmaking in particular has been a highly rewarding vehicle and as I near the completion of my 6th documentary, I always look forward to supporting the growth of human consciousness.
How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?
In my view, one of the best ways for society to support artists and creatives is to help build visibility through social media as well as other outlets whether commercial or independent. As creatives, we are often times vehicles for the communities we serve and so getting the word out on projects can really help with goals and issues that matter most.
What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?
For me, the most rewarding part of being a creative are all of the individuals and audiences I have met and collaborated with during this journey. It is through this process that I have learned and grown from as well as helped heal my community. One of the most recent endeavors I feel has made this work truly worth it is the creation and launching of two new film festivals – the Chicanx Latinx Film Festival with partner Hipolito Muñoz Navarrete and Jessica Just of Creating Creators and the Pasifika Film Festival with partner Joey Quenga of Island City Media. Housed at my academic institution of Cal State University at Los Angeles, both festivals aim to deepen connections between students, academia, industry and community. And it was beautiful to experience the excitement by my students in the screening of their films as well as in creating a new space for Polynesian-Micronesian-Melanesian filmmakers from around the world to share their work.
Contact Info:
- Website: lanicupchoy.com
- Instagram: iamlanicupchoy
- Facebook: Art by Lani Cupchoy
- Youtube: Lani Cupchoy