Two Recent Hawaii Premieres

Tom Coffman's "The First Battle" screened at the Hawaii Theater last night. The Honolulu Advertiser did a great write-up of the film's subject: how the 140,000 Japanese Americans in Hawaii narrowly escaped internment during WWII--a fate that most of their West Coast counterparts (110,000 of them) suffered. Coffman believes that had the internment of Japanese American from Hawaii happened, Hawaii would be a very different place now: "You basically would have had an enormous sector of the population that had been victimized and excluded from participation in the war...And there would have been this horrible division resulting in our community and it would have endured for generations." "The First Battle" will screen on the neighbor islands in November, and on PBS in December.

On a much lighter note, the first few Season 2 episodes of Discovery Kids' "Flight 29 Down" premiered on Saturday at Waikiki's Sunset on the Beach event. The only cast member present was local girl Tani Lynn Fujimoto. The series is shot on Oahu's North Shore. The majority of its 60 crew members are local, and each episode costs under $400K to make.

>> Internment busters [Hnl Advertiser, 9/4/06]
>> Hawaii actress Tani Lynn gets tough in the second season of "Flight 29" [Hnl Star-Bulletin, 9/4/06]

RELATED POSTS:
>> Premiere of PBS Doc "The First Battle"
>> Listen and Learn
>> A Pictorial History of Hawaii
>> PBS Celebrates Asian Pacific American Heritage Month
>> Documentary on Little Known Pearl Harbor Story
>> Upcoming Educational Films