HAPA-PALOOZA FESTIVAL:

CANADA’S LARGEST CELEBRATION OF MIXED HERITAGE & HYBRID IDENTITY

A 6-day festival featuring a vibrant fusion of music, art, storytelling, film, dance and community gatherings celebrating mixed heritage and hybrid identity.

VANCOUVER, B.C.—Hapa-palooza welcomes all people to 7 FREE public events during its festival September 23 to 28, 2014, in locations in Vancouver chosen for central and easy access by public transportation. Now in its fourth year, Hapa-palooza Festival is Canada’s largest festival celebrating and stimulating awareness of mixed heritage and hybrid identity. Held annually in Vancouver, a diverse city that celebrates hybridity, synergy and acceptance, Hapa-palooza Festival embraces the word ‘Hapa,’ of Hawaiian origins, as a broad term for people identifying as having mixed heritage. Hosted by the Hybrid Ancestry Public Arts (HAPA) Society, Hapa-palooza Festival features an unprecedented array of mixed-heritage artists in the mediums of film, music, visual and literary arts.

This year, Hapa-palooza will honour three remarkable community leaders of mixed heritage by presenting the first ever Hapa-palooza Hip Hapa Hooray! awards reception. This year’s recipients include the Youth Achievement Award presented to Ann Makosinski (16-year-old inventor of the hollow flashlight that runs on human heat and 2013 Google Science Fair winner), Community Builder Award presented toKip Fulbeck (award-winning US artist, activist, actor and author) and the Lifetime Achievement Award presented to Fred Wah (Governor General’s Award Winner and Canada’s fifth Parliamentary Poet Laureate).

The festival is honoured to be supported by the City of Vancouver, the Vancouver Public Library, and Citizenship and Immigration Canada. As well as numerous community partners, including the Nikkei National Museum and Cultural Centre, Vancouver Asian Film Festival, Beats without Borders and Eclipse Awards.

A full listing of Hapa-palooza Festival events can be found at hapapalooza.com

MEDIA CONTACT

Zarah Martz
info@hapapalooza.com
604-250-4772

http://youtu.be/wzjksj2XR8E
This year’s Vancouver International Film Festival will feature the world premiere of a Japanese film about 1930s and ’40s Vancouver – specifically Japantown, and a storied baseball team of that era. Yuya Ishii’s The Vancouver Asahi tells the story of the team which had been hugely successful, but then fell apart after the banishment of Japanese-Canadians to internment camps during the Second World War.  

The Vancouver Asian Writers’ Workshop (ACWW) is pleased to announce the countdown to its much anticipated celebration of Pacific Rim Asian Canadian writing set for October 9th to 12th, 2014 in Vancouver, BC. As a non-profit organization with a mandate to promote awareness of Asian Canadian literature, history, and culture, ACWW provide a supportive and culturally sensitive environment for members from a common Pacific Rim Asian Canadian heritage. ACWW also is the publisher of Ricepaper Magazine.

The main venue for the festival is the UBC Learning Exchange situated in the middle of Vancouver’s historical Chinatown at 612 Main Street. The UBC Learning Exchange is a community engagement initiative that brings together a wide variety of people, and facilitates connections in the Downtown Eastside between local residents, organizations and the UBC Community.

LiterASIAN 2014: A Festival of Pacific Rim Asian Canadian Writing begins Oct. 9 – 12 and will feature authors, Fred Wah, Louise Bak, Tom Cho, Corinna Chong, Doretta Lau,Edwin Lee, Serena Leung, Kim Fu, Souvankham Thammavongsa, Yasuko Nguyen Thanh, Elsie Sze and Lily Chow. There will be author readings, book launches and book signings, a special poetry reading evening with open mike, Book fair, outreach event at Richmond Library and Cultural Centre and our second annual celebration dinner fundraiser at the Pink Pearl Restaurant.

LiterASIAN: a Festival of Pacific Rim Asian Canadian Writing is a community-building initiative by the Asian Canadian Writers’ Workshop and Ricepaper Magazine.

Interviews and photo opportunities are available.

For media inquiries contact Festival Director, Jim Wong-Chu -604-355-579 5
Website: www.asiancanadianwriters.ca | www.ricepapermagazine.ca/literASIAN

As part of the Powell Street Festival, a screening of Hafu will be featured at the Firehall Arts Centre on August 3.  According to the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, one in forty-nine babies born in Japan today are born into families with one non-Japanese parent. This newly emerging minority in Japan is under-documented and under-explored in both literature and media. The feature-length HD documentary ?lm, Hafu – the mixed-race experience in Japan, seeks to open this increasingly important dialogue. The ?lm explores race, diversity, multiculturalism, nationality, and identity within the mixed-race community of Japan. And through this exploration, it seeks to answer the following questions: “What does it mean to be hafu?”, “What does it mean to be Japanese?” – and ultimately, “What does all of this mean for Japan?”

Narrated by the hafus themselves, along with candid interviews and cinéma vérité footage, the viewer is guided through a myriad of hafu experiences that are influenced by upbringing, family relationships, education, and even physical appearance. As the film interweaves five unique life stories, audiences discover the depth and diversity of hafu personal identities.

Website: http://hafufilm.com/en

Sunday August 3rd at the Firehall Arts Centre from 4pm to 5:30pm (87 min screening).

Shun Li works in a textile factory in the outskirts of Rome in order to get her papers and enable her eight-year-old son to come to Italy. She is suddenly transferred to Chioggia, a small city-island in the Veneto lagoon, to work as a bartender in a pub.

Bepi, a Slavic fisherman, nicknamed “the Poet” by his friends, has been a regular at that little pub for years.  Their encounter is a poetic escape from solitude, a silent dialogue between cultures that are different, yet not more distant. It is an odyssey into the deep heart of a lagoon, which can be both the mother and cradle of identities, which never keep still.  But the friendship between Shun Li and Bepi upsets both the Chinese and local communities.

Presented by the Vancouver Foreign Film Society | Rio Theatre (1660 E Broadway, Vancouver) | Website: http://www.iosonoli.com/