Filmmaker Castillos: "Not Your Typical Leader"

     Last night, the documentary "Remember the Boys" aired on this public television station. It's the story of the 50 "Hawaii boys" assigned to the U.S. Army's 1st Filipino Infantry Regiment during World War 2.

      The film is one of local girl Stephanie Castillos' nine documentaries. Among others: 1992's Emmy-winning "Simple Courage," looking back at Hawaii's handling of the leprosy epidemic that began in 1865 and exploring whether we learned anything in dealing with the "modern-day leprosy" of AIDS.

      Stephanie's own story is also a powerful one. We know her work well here at PBS Hawaii. We know her fascination with ideas and images and story-telling, we know her quiet determination and ability to raise funds and do whatever is necessary to see a project through.

      She was a newspaper reporter, the Honolulu Star-Bulletin's Maui bureau chief, who felt trapped in what others considered an influential and interesting job.

      "I felt a huge gulf, a huge canyon between my job on Maui and my true calling. How was I ever going to get to my passion?" she says.

       She'd never made a film--but she believed filmmaking is what she was meant to do.

      "My mom was taking me to the movies when I was still holding my baby bottle. She never read books to me and my sisters--the movies were our story-telling landscapes," she said.

        "And so my ideas take the shape of movies, they come to me as waking dreams, as thoughts that spring from my mind and my heart, cinematic messages that must find their way to the canvas called movies and to the listeners called audiences," she shared with a gathering of women.

         Stephanie broke out of daily deadlines and used her journalism training, good instincts and networking to make her way into the filmmaking world.          

         She's enjoyed critical success but hasn't gotten wealthy making films. Not in the sense of money, anyway. She's held a series of different jobs, as she pursues her calling.

        "As a filmmaker, I'm not your traditional leader. I am not running a big corporation, managing hundreds, the head of a state. I lead with ideas and thoughts and visions that I hope will reach millions of minds and hearts. I am a storyteller."

         Stephanie's Honolulu-based production company is 'Olena Productions. She's one of the people I count on in Hawaii to shine a light where I never looked--and show me something that challenges me and enriches me.