It’s First Friday in Chinatown, and a decent-sized audience is gathering in the dim light of Ong King. The demographic is mixed: young hipsters, middle-aged yuppies, unassuming Honolulu businesspeople checking out the live entertainment after work, still clad in their ubiquitous aloha shirts and dress pants.


The crowd settles down, and a band starts their set. The bespectacled guitarist hammers out distorted semi-improvisational guitar. The drummer keeps a basic beat on a sole tom-tom. A hyper-kinetic teenage girl screams atonal nonsense into a traffic cone and leers menacingly at the audience. 


HIFF29 is more than the movies —more than the quintessential back-up date or air-conditioned hideout on a hot Sunday afternoon.

The Hawaii International Film Festival is a marathon of 170 films from 36 countries — a white-water rapids of creative vision coursing for only 10 days, from Oct. 15 to 25.