Aloha brouhaha

Photo: The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

Some Native Hawaiians disapprove of the name of a movie filmed and set in Hawaii, saying that titling it "Aloha" is a disrespectful misappropriation of culture and simplifies a word that's rich with meaning.

The Cameron Crowe film starring Bradley Cooper, Rachel McAdams and Emma Stone, opens Friday, with a screening in Honolulu three days before. The concerns are based largely on a trailer that depicts a military-themed love-story that appears devoid of a genuine connection to Hawaiian culture.

Sony Pictures did not comment on the concerns, pointing The Associated Press to an online behind-the-scenes piece that shows Stone's character saying, "this place has a lot of mana," using a Hawaiian word that can mean power. There are shots of hula and interviews with Dennis "Bumpy" Kanahele, a Native Hawaiian sovereignty activist who appears in the movie.

"If you have a romantic comedy about the military in Hawaii ... but a title that says 'Aloha,' I can only guess that they'll bastardize the word," said Walter Ritte, a Native Hawaiian activist on the island of Molokai. "They're taking our sacred word ... and they're going to make a lot of money off of it."

In the Hawaiian language, aloha is not just a greeting or a word to convey love. It has other meanings including, compassion, mercy, grace.

"Aloha actually comes from two Hawaiian words: alo — which means the front of a person, the part of our bodies that we share and take in people. And ha, which is our breath," Janet Mock, a Native Hawaiian, said on her MSNBC Shift show "So Popular!" where she panned the title. "When we are in each other's presence with the front of our bodies, we are exchanging the breath of life."

The trailer is an example of "typical Hollywood," where "Hawaii is the verdant background for white fantasies," said Ty Kawika Tengan, chair of the ethnic studies department at the University of Hawaii's Manoa campus.

"It's been so appropriated in so many different ways — made into a commodity, made into a slogan," he said of the word aloha. "It gets so divorced from important indigenous Hawaiian context. ... It's romanticized, literally, into a romantic comedy."

During filming in 2013, the movie was untitled. State Film Commissioner Donne Dawson said if she had known the title, she would have advised against it.

"I certainly would have seen it as an opportunity to counsel them ... and then allow them to figure it out for themselves," she said.

The Hawaii Film Office is a state agency that promotes the industry and administers permits and tax credits. The office must also balance those duties with protecting resources and communities, said Dawson, who is Native Hawaiian.

"We've had a century of misrepresentation, of misunderstanding, of miscommunication of who we are," she said of Hawaii's role in the movies that dates to 1913. "We have fallen prey to the stereotypical ideas ... that people have about Hawaii. It's not based in truth and it's not authentic."