On May 27th at 12pm PT, join us for a discussion with the visionary filmmakers of THE ROGERS as they chat about their experiences on communicating complex and sometimes controversial ideas in documentary filmmaking, including transgender visibility in Pacific Islander culture. 

Livestreams are also available to watch on the Visual Communications Youtube Channel and the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival Facebook page!

Featuring:

Kiki Rivera (Host)

Kiki Rivera is an internationally produced, award-winning theatre artist, educator, and arts activist. Kiki has her BA in Theatre as well as her MFA in Playwriting from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, and is a member of the 2018 ArtEquity cohort who holds workshops to encourage the growth of future indigenous storytellers. As an educated gender-queer person of color (Samoan-Filipinx born and raised in Hawaii) that is cis-femme presenting, Kiki recognizes her privilege and responsibility to those marginalized communities. Her work focuses on cultural and sexual identity and the effects of colonization. Kiki is one of many voices for Pacific Islanders in the diaspora and is published in Samoan Queer Lives edited by Yuki Kihara and Dan Talaupapa McMullin. Kiki believes in self-reflective storytelling from a contemporary indigenous perspective and creating space for marginalized theatre artists of color.

Dean Hamer

Dean Hamer is an Emmy Award-winning filmmaker and New York Times Book of the Year author with a long history in communicating complex and controversial ideas to diverse publics. He formed Qwaves with partner Joe Wilson to make documentaries that inspire creativity and compel us to act. Their films about often overlooked social issues have screened and won awards at film festivals around the world, including Tribeca, Berlin, LA and Toronto. Qwaves Pacific films include the Independent Lens audience award-winning KUMU HINA, about transgender cultural icon Hinaelimoana Wong-Kalu, and LEITIS IN WAITING, a portrait of Tonga's vital transgender population. Hamer and Wilson are currently collaborating with Wong-Kalu on KAPAEMAHU, an animated documentary based on a long-suppressed Hawaiian legend.

Joe Wilson

Joe Wilson is a filmmaker who got involved in documentaries through his social activism on human rights issues. Frustrated by the limitations of traditional organizing and advocacy, he picked up a camera to reach broader audiences with stories that would inform and compel people to act. In 2004, Wilson returned to his small hometown of Oil City, Pennsylvania, to direct and produce the Emmy Award-winning PBS documentary OUT IN THE SILENCE about his marriage to co-director/producer Dean Hamer. For the past nine years, they have been working on a series of films on the intersections between human rights, colonialism and religion in the Pacific Islands. Wilson and Hamer are fellows of the Sundance Institute and their work has been supported by the Ford Foundation, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and Pacific Islanders in Communications.