From the earliest voyagers who navigated by starlight, to present-day astronomers scanning the cosmos for habitable planets, explorers have long made Hawaii the hub for their searching. Today—as lava continues to flow on the island—another crisis mounts as scientists plan to build the world’s largest telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii’s most sacred and revered mountain.
In his dynamic feature debut, Fern Silva examines myriad encounters with an island world at sea. Drawing from subjects as seemingly disparate as the arrival of Christian missionaries and the controversial casting of Dwayne Johnson as King Kamehameha, the film weaves a vital tapestry of post-colonialism and pop culture with cinematic brio and a wry wit. Rock Bottom Riser is an essential document and an exhilarating tour-de-force, a palimpsest that traverses geology, ethnography and astronomy.
Format: 35mm
SHOWTIMES
Saturday March 12, 2022 - 4:00 PM, 6:00 PM, 8:00 PM
Sunday March 13, 2023 - 3:30 PM, 5:30 PM, 7:30 PM
[A] psychedelic mixtape of a movie.
- Beatrice Loayza, The New York Times
Invigorating… otherworldly… hypnotically beautiful.
- Keith Watson, Slant Magazine
Feels in harmony with the spiritual essence of Earth’s eruptions and mankind’s efforts to control them.
- Glenn Heath Jr, The Film Stage
Fern Silva’s debut feature flips the idea of a nature documentary on its head and melts it down into something that feels almost entirely new.
- David Ehrlich, Indiewire
Juxtaposes the ideas and experiences of others in much the same way Silva’s earlier films combined potentially conflicting image and sound sets, breaking given cultural spheres apart and poetically reassembling them as competing temporalities.
- Michael Sicinski, Cinema Scope
(Available to download after screening date)