The Ali'i King
2023 · 27m · USA
Directed by Christine Kunewa Walker
Genres: drama, family, historical
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
In the 1960s, a Hawaiian-German Mormon family's road trip through the Utah desert to Tikiland's opening exposes painful cultural and emotional divisions.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Walker takes the road-trip family drama — basically cinema's most exhausted premise — and threads it through Hawaiian colonialism, Mormon theology, and a theme park opening, which should be a mess but somehow isn't; the fact that it *works* almost annoys me, which means it's actually doing something.
The film's restraint is its rigor: Walker situates this intimate family fracture within a precise historical moment (Tikiland's 1963 opening) and uses that specificity as a formal container, allowing the editing and tonal shifts between the family's interior crisis and the desert landscape to breathe with the weight of unspoken cultural erasure.
The decision to keep the Tikiland park itself almost entirely off-screen — letting it exist only as anticipation and disappointment in the family's dialogue — transforms what could've been a nostalgic romp into something elegiac, and that single structural choice is what makes the melancholy land.