Moving Home: The Legacy of Halla Pai Huhm

From 2010-2012, I wrote, directed, and produced the documentary Moving Home: The Legacy of Halla Pai Huhm, a biography of the late dancer and teacher Halla Huhm. What began as questions about cultural memory and how it is carried in the body led me to a year of Korean traditional dance lessons at the Halla Huhm Dance Studio in Honolulu and down a rabbit hole into one of the most meaningful and challenging projects I had the privilege to work on. Mary Jo Freshley took over the studio after Halla Huhm’s passing and was a stealth archivist and transmitter of oral history. With her help, I connected with several generations of students. I spent hundreds of hours mining the carefully documented archive of past performances and studio life housed at the Center for Korean Studies at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. Writing a biography is a formidable task, especially for an Asian American female subject whose history was largely obscured, silenced, and unknown due to conditions of war and migration. This documentary is one version of her story, hopefully, among many.

Synopsis:

A visually poignant and enigmatic portrait, MOVING HOME explores the life of dancer Halla Pai Huhm, whose life was shaped by the turbulent tides between Korea, Japan, and Hawai'i during the early half of the 20th century. Not afraid to uproot the debased image of the female dancer and the attributed mystic shaman origins of Korean dance, Huhm was a pioneer in staging dances that made Korean identity visible against the backdrop of colonialism, war, and immigration, leaving behind a significant legacy. Through interviews and archival footage of performances and studio rehearsals, the film unravels the entanglements of identity and loss that imbued Huhm's character and movement language and motivated her to forge her artistic path in an unfamiliar place. MOVING HOME brings to light the impermanence of home, self, and place, yet it reveals the transcendent potential of the body and the unyielding force of a dancer's spirit.

Buy a DVD of the film.