Standing Above the Clouds

Best Social Impact Documentary, 2024 HotDocs Canadian International Documentary Festival

This is the legacy not just left, but led by the Kānaka Maoli who offer their hearts forward to Mauna Kea, a sacred ancestor in the realm of Wākea, and the earth’s tallest mountain stretching over 33,000 feet from the ocean floor. STANDING ABOVE THE CLOUDS attests to such legacy by following the lives of three Native Hawaiian matriarchies in fierce defense of their holy mountain against the proposed construction of the massive Thirty Meter Telescope. Be it through the soft songs shared on a sunset ascent or through defiant chants on the mountain’s summit, activism becomes a way of life that is “not about fighting something… [but] loving something.” That love resounds in the offerings made not just to Mauna Kea, but even to the people who endanger it – as Kūpuna (elders), bound together in song, offer lāī to police, begging them to remember the land from which we all came.

With archival footage dating back from the 1950s onwards, director Jalena Keane-Lee uplifts present-day struggles with the timeless efforts of warriors past. In the face of ongoing industrial warfare and ecological genocide, the film treads scrupulously to neither pedestalize nor romanticize the very real and material battles these Kia’i (protectors) undertake, as the health of the mountain is indiscriminately linked to the health of her people in a mutual ecology between land and her descendants. As reality breaks open along with the hearts of those who bend that reality toward justice, STANDING ABOVE THE CLOUDS “wears the heart of the Mauna” with pride and dignity, staking steadfast claim to Indigenous wisdom, culture, and power.

– Che’Li