Kauai Community College hosts free arts weekend with concerts, film screening

Free admission turned the Kauai Community College Performing Arts Center into one of the island’s rare low-cost cultural gathering places, filling the 564-seat stage auditorium with families, students and seniors across a three-event arts weekend in Lihue. The college’s PAC, which KCC describes as the Garden Isle’s “entertainment and information exchange centerpiece,” gave local audiences access to live music, youth filmmaking and island-to-island film culture without a ticket barrier.

Friday night opened with Sarah Tochiki conducting the Kauai Youth Honor Band and the KCC Wind Symphony in a program built to balance crowd appeal and concert-band tradition. The lineup included Hawaii Five-O, Super Mario Bros, Goddess of Fire, British Eighth March and The Spirit of Aloha, a mix that paired recognizable themes with formal ensemble literature. The concert also underscored the reach of KCC’s instrumental music program, which rehearses in both fall and spring semesters and lists the Wind Symphony as the only concert band ensemble in the University of Hawaii System.

Patrons who came for the concert also saw a screen presentation of Nene, a documentary by Hawaii Technology Academy junior Kaylee Lee. Lee said she made the film to help people understand the nene’s history and importance, and the project later became a finalist at Ōlelo Youth Xchange 2026 on Oahu. Ōlelo’s finalists page identifies the film as Nēnē: He Leo Nō Ka Āina and lists Lee in the Informational category, giving the student work a wider audience beyond Kauai. The same film later appeared on PAC lobby monitors and served as a curtain raiser for Sunday’s programming.

Sunday’s Tahiti Film Festival on Kauai extended that free-access model with six films shown in three blocks, beginning at 1 p.m., 3 p.m. and 5 p.m. KCC student clubs sold soft drinks, chips, cookies and popcorn, and a popcorn machine donated by the Mayfield family helped turn the event into a community gathering rather than a classroom-only screening. The festival was co-sponsored by KCC History Professor Mark Ombrello, the Division of Language, Arts and Humanities, the PAC and Laura Theron of FIFO, and it grew from an idea brought back from the Tahiti Film Festival in Papeete by Kauai filmmakers Teri Tico and Lillian Ball.

The weekend fit a broader resurgence at the PAC after the venue reopened in summer 2024, more than four years after it closed for COVID-related interruptions and repairs. Crowd sizes have rebounded since then, and the free weekend showed how the college can function as a civic anchor: a place where island musicians, student filmmakers and community audiences can meet in the same room and pay nothing to enter.