Held at venues in Naha, Okinawa, from Nov. 23 to 29, the first Cinema at Sea festival presented an ambitious and carefully curated program of films from Okinawa as well as Japan, the Asia-Pacific region and beyond. A keyword for the inaugural event was “diversity,” as festival director Huang Yin-yu and his programming team reached beyond major film production centers to places and peoples underrepresented in world cinema.

“We don’t have separate fiction and documentary awards,” Huang says in an interview at Naha’s Sakurazaka Theater, a main festival site. “One reason is that a lot of islands make very few fiction films. Also, many islands have minorities living there without much of a chance to have their voices heard in cinema. It’s easier for them to start with documentaries. So it’s very important for us to include them. As someone with a documentary background, I believe cinema is cinema.”

One example of this programming policy is “God Is a Woman,” Swiss-Panamanian director Andres Peyrot’s documentary that examines the complex feelings the Kuna, indigenous people living on Panama’s San Blas Islands, have about an unreleased documentary made about them in 1975 by acclaimed French filmmaker Pierre-Dominique Gaisseau. Kuna elders interviewed by Peyrot recall Gaisseau’s stay — and his exoticizing approach to their culture — with a mix of nostalgia and criticism. However, when they finally see a print of the film at a public screening, four decades after Gaisseau shot it, their reaction to seeing themselves, as well as long-departed relatives, is simply moving.

Also exemplifying the festival’s commitment to diversity is “Orpa,” a fiction feature set in Papua, Indonesia’s easternmost province, by Papuan rapper-turned-filmmaker Theo Rumansara. The title protagonist is a Papuan girl who wants to further her education but is thwarted by her impoverished family’s desire to marry her off to a well-off older man. Rather than accept her fate, she runs off and encounters a bumbling musician from Jakarta who has become lost in the jungle. This mismatched pair’s adventures on the road, comic and otherwise, follow a familiar genre arc but weave in much that is specific to Papuan culture, such as Orpa’s familiarity with plants used in traditional medicine. Her cures for what ails them on their way, including the musician’s near-fatal asthma attack, feel convincing, just as her sweet but indomitable character charms.

Among the Okinawans featured in the festival was Mao Ishikawa, a photographer who was the subject of Hiroshi Sunairi’s 2022 documentary “From Okinawa with Love.” Now 70 and fighting a long battle with Stage 4 cancer, Ishikawa started her career in the mid-1970s photographing Black American servicemen and the Okinawan women who worked at bars catering to them. Taking jobs at these bars herself, as well as becoming romantically involved with her customers (while rejecting their marriage proposals), Ishikawa captured her subjects with a raw intimacy and honesty.

In the documentary, she revisits scenes of her youth and reminisces about her early work with unapologetic directness and bite.

“I loved American soldiers but hated the American military,” she says. “Does that sound contradictory?” Perhaps so, but it made for great photographic art and, for Sunairi, a film that stood out as my personal festival highlight amid a strong lineup.