Pasifika First Fridays, a local monthly pop-up arts festival, haspartnered with the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center and Sydney based Pasifika Film Fest, to create a four-day festival of Pacific films, artists and a 48-hour film challenge to be shownat The Gateway in downtown Salt Lake City from Feb 1-3, 2019.
Pasifika Film Fest 2019 seeks to introduce Utah community members to diverse, contemporary films from across the Pacific and Oceania diaspora. The community-ran festival will showcase the works of Pacific Islander filmmakers from the U.S., Australia, Micronesia, Melanesia, and Polynesia. The festival programming aims to enhance the vitality of independent filmmaking among and about Pacific Islander narratives with panel presentations, film production, guest speakers, screenwriting workshops, and networking events.
The wider festival will bring a curated program of 10 short films and two feature films all written and created by Pacific people. Films will be screened between Friday Feb 1 and Sunday Feb 3. Alongside the film program, Pasifika First Fridays will bring Salt Lake City its first ever Pacific 48 Hour Film Challenge. Saturday Feb 2 will also bring a catalogue of local artists to The Gateway for performances and celebration of Pacific community and Pacific film.
Co-Director of Pasifika Film Fest, Eliorah Malifa, will be attending the festival and expresses her excitement to be in Salt Lake City for the 2019 Pasifika Film Fest: “The central focus of Pasifika Film Fest is to ensure that aspiring Pacific filmmakers have the tools available to them to show their work and filmgoing audiences are able to see these Pacific stories being told. So I am gee’d to come to Salt Lake and put on a show for some of our community in the US. And hopefully this will result in more collaboration across borders, countries, oceans in the future.”
For more information about Pasifika Film Fest 2019 and to register for tickets, visit Pasifika First
Friday’s website at www.pasifikafirstfridays.com.