WADAlife / Showdown In Chinatown got its start in late 2005 as banter in the pressure-cooker of the Lost set. Tory Tukuafu, who’s been part of the camera crew since the hit show’s inception, remembers a co-worker boasting about preparing to make a better short film than anyone else on set. “We were working 75 hours a week, and there’s only so much time, but we decided to find out,” Tukuafu recalls. “We told everybody that anybody who wanted to participate could meet us at Kakaako park on a Saturday at 9am. We got there and split up teams like you do in a pickup basketball game.”

Tukuafu says the filmmakers gave themselves just 12 hours, agreeing to show the results at thirtyninehotel at 9pm. “So come 1am, when we were all actually finally done,” he laughs, “we showed those first four movies.”

The group agreed to meet again the following month, word and participation began to spread, and by March of the following year, Showdown In Chinatown had a Web site, a blog, an e-mail list and a quasi-official status as the rite of passage for aspiring local filmmakers, a reputation that has only burgeoned since. Around that time, the event caught the attention of Robert Poleki, a social worker who had always been interested in movies.

Poleki’s brother, Daniel, remembers it. “My brother came home one night in 2006 and said, ‘Eh. Let’s make a movie.’ I was like, ‘excuse me?’”

Neither of the brothers had any filmmaking experience. “My brother was the only one who’d even been to college,” said Daniel.

Robert Poleki says the brothers had always shared an interest in film–he’d even carried a video camera around college, though nothing ever came of it. “One night, though, I was watching OC-16 and I just thought, ‘Hey.’”

The brothers decided to enter Showdown In Chinatown. Their first effort, back in 2006, was called Egg Surprise.

“I remember that they walked in to thirtyninehotel and it was kind of, ‘Who the hell are these guys?’” Tukuafu says. “But that first film of theirs, I’ll never forget it. It was completely underexposed, the framing wasn’t great, but their storytelling was just phenomenal. Everyone in the audience was in stitches. And this was their first movie ever? I just thought, ‘Wow, these guys are good.”

Egg Surprise finished second in that month’s Showdown competition, and Wadalife Films was born. “The name comes from something my mom used to say,” Daniel says. “She’d see my brother laying around doing nothing and she’d shake her head and say, ‘What a life!’”

The core members of the outfit are the Poleki brothers and their sister Tracey Puaina, along with David Hall, Frank Kuresa, Silau Tavale, Wil Fatafehi and Jacob Sur, several of whom are Robert’s former classmates at Radford High School. Robert estimates the team has made roughly 20 films since 2006.

“The running theme is mostly comedy,” says Daniel. “We’ve actually tried to make serious films in the past, but somehow by the time we shoot them, they always turned into comedies.”

As the crew has gained experience, they’ve built a strong following at Showdown.

“People love them,” Tukuafu says, “and you can see why.”

At a Showdown event earlier this summer, Wadalife’s arrival at the screening produced a roar of approval from the crowd–their film placed in the top three on the judge’s scorecards, as their offerings often do. “These guys are legitimate filmmakers now,” says Tukuafu. “It’s fantastic to see.”

In recent months, the Poleki’s have taken another big step–they’ve begun to plot a much more intentional course toward a career in film.

“My parents think we’re idiots,” says Daniel with a laugh. “They think we’re wasting our time. But at the same time, my dad started to tell us, ‘If you have a following and people are saying good things about you, you should try to make a living at it.’”

In considering how they might expand its presence in the film community, the team knew it also needed to expand its range.

“We realized that we already know how to make people laugh,” Daniel says. “But what about the other 500-something emotional states that make us human?”

The upshot of those conversations is the brothers’ first foray outside of comedy, a 10-minute short called Malaga that they’ll unveil later this month at the Soul Savior Chronicles Film Festival in Honolulu. A glance at the film’s trailer (search [youtube.com] for “wadalife” and “malaga”) makes it clear that Malaga is a departure from their previous efforts, both in terms of production values and plot line.

The film concerns a kind of Polynesian vision quest. “Malaga means journey,” Daniel explains. “A group of kids are led into the forest and left there to fend for themselves. The two brothers encounter something in the forest, and because they’re opposites, one has to sacrifice himself to save the other.”

Malaga is the crew’s first film in which none of the core members of the Wadalife ‘ohana appear on screen. It also represents a leap in their process, as the brothers storyboarded the entire film before shooting–something they’d never done before.

Wadalife still funds its projects the same way it did in the beginning–more or less by passing the hat–but that may be about to change, too, as the brothers have begun to seek out institutional funding and grants for an upcoming project to be shot in Western Samoa.

For now, though, all eyes are on Malaga.

“I’m sure some people make great films because they went to school or had that kind of training,” said Daniel. “For us, we’re not really artsy-fartsy dudes. We just love film. And here we are. My brother wants to take this thing to Sundance. We figure, why not? What do we have to lose?”

Chuck, You Da Man-1st place Winner Showdown in Chinatown

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