There is an inescapable sadness in Cris Romento’s impassioned Dear Aloha. Seeing the toll that Hawaiian Diaspora has taken on the native population and their powerful resilience as they try to keep a semblence of their culture and spirituality of home – an important watch.

To the outsider, Hawaiʻi is the dream location to live and grow up in. The most beautiful of sceneries, why would you ever leave? Shockingly, over 53% of native Hawaiians do not live on the islands, with a large portion residing in the Pacific Northwest. Filmmaker Cris Romento tries to discover why so many have left their homeland.

The first thing that gut punches you in Dear Aloha is that this Hawaiian diaspora is not one made of choice. The people, like director Cris Romento’s family, appear to have had little choice in the matter of whether they wanted to raise their family comfortably and flourish instead of struggling for the rest of their lives. Hawai’i has seemingly not been immune to the dreaded gentrification that so many other areas worldwide have encountered over the past 50 or so years. This shift has not only disrupted the affordable living but also the very fabric of native communities, leading to a devastating loss for those who were native to that land.

As Romentos’ research and discussions go on, we find out how much of a loss it is to these people that they cannot live where they are native to. The cultural loss is palpable, and you feel their grief and anger as they try to make the best of their situation. The feeling of losing their identity grows with each passing year away from the islands, away from home. You feel that yearning to permanently return seep out of the screen as if a piece of them has been cut out of their soul. Romento does some terrific work in showing this and having the audience firmly wish for things to turn around.

What Dear Aloha also shows us in abundance the strength and resilience of the native Hawaiians as they do everything within their power to keep their culture alive whilst living on the mainland. They need to feel that spiritual connection to home. Despite the utterly devastating sadness that is within them, they do find ways to sustain that. It’s a double-edged sword in how you feel in those moments in the short documentary. You are happy that they can find a slither of a connection to their homeland. Yet, you remember why they have to try so hard to even get a glimmer of that slither in their lives and the sheer effort involved in achieving it.

Dear Aloha is a purposefully painful but informative watch that highlights a troubling issue that has been going on for multiple generations without much notoriety. Hopefully, with documentaries like this, more people can be made aware of a key issue for not only Hawaiians but a lot of countless others across the Pacific Islands.

★★★★

Dear Aloha played at the 4th World Media Lab and the cINeDIGENOUS section at the 51st Seattle International Film Festival.

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