Sara Russo

     On Friday November 10th, students attending the Hawaii International Film Festival at the University of Hawaii were treated to the screening of pornographic movies.

     The two films shown at this year's festival were over two decades apart in date but scarcely dissimilar in terms of pornographic content. In order to properly view the first film, 3-D Disco Dolls in Hot Skin which dates from 1978, the audience was given 3-D glasses. The second movie, Lies, is Korean in origin. Produced in 1999, the film portrays a high school girl and a 38-year-old married man, and their sado-masochistic obsessions.

     While this is the first year that the festival has showcased pornographic films, Dr. Victor Kobayashi from Outreach College, who was involved in the festival, asserts that movies that could be considered pornographic have been shown at the festival in previous years. Kobayashi asserts that at these past festivals no one "raised a fuss."

     Far from being upset at the lewd content of the films, Anderson Le, administrator, associate programmer and education coordinator of the festival, claims that students attending the festival in the past were actually put off by the lack of pornographic content.

     Last year the festival showed a documentary on porn star John Holmes, entitled, Wadd: The Life & Times of John C. Holmes, which, according to Lee, was very popular. However, it later appeared that some students were misled about the nature of the film. "People were expecting porn, but it was a straightforward, serious documentary and a lot of people were disappointed," Lee explained.

     Those students made unhappy by last year's lack of porn could not issue the same complaint about this year's festival. An anonymous UH student quoted by the campus paper asserted that 3-D Disco Dolls in Hot Skin was "definitely a porn—100 percent."

     According to that student, "a few people walked out" of the film, but the biggest complaint of the evening concerned the 3-D glasses. "The glasses didn’t really work," explained the student, "four to five places were in 3-D."