Director/Writer/Producer

Kanani Koster is a Kanaka Maoli director based in PDX//LAX and a ‘24 American Film Institute Directing Fellow. She has spoken on numerous panels on race, diversity and representation in film as well as serving as a judge for the 2022 Big Sky Documentary Film Festival. Kanani is the 2020 Oregon Made Film Grant winner for the docu-short, Any Oregon Sunday, and a 2020 Portland Arts Museum Re:Imagined Artist recipient. Her latest short film No Spectators Allowed, has won and been nominated for awards such as the Best of the PNW Short Film at the 2022 Bend Film Festival and included in the The Smithsonian National Museum of American Indian’s Fall 2023 showcase. She is the Acquisitions & Impact Manager at Collective Eye Films but spends the off season working on set; be it as a director, producer or AD.

Kanani’s visual style and storytelling is focused on juxtaposing our past and present through reflection and echoes. The stories she strives to tell are not bound by genre but challenge nostalgia and tropes through inclusion and normalization of historically under-represented peoples on screen.

She has worked in the marketing and outreach department for both Seattle International Film Festival and the Northwest Film Center. Kanani was the Doculab Impact Lab Coordinator for A-Doc and Haverford in 2022. As the Acquisitions & Impact Manager for Collective Eye she has implemented campaigns for Personhood: Policing Pregnant Women in America, Food for the Rest of Us and other catalogue films focusing on community driven social change and partnerships with notable organizations like ACLU, Planned Parenthood and NAPW. She has programmed two shorts collections for Collective Eye: To Us the Ashes: Indigenous Shorts, Breaking the Model: Stories of Asian American History and Presence and Fractal: Stories Across the Gender Spectrum.

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FILM PROJECTS

Director → Behind the Curtain (AFI Thesis 2023). Director → The Apricots “You” (2022) Director → No Spectators Allowed (2021) Director → Li HiNG MUi (2021)
Director → Any Oregon Sunday (2020) Director → AIDIA (2019)
Director → The New Frontier (2018)