Cane Fire

Editor turned filmmaker Anthony Banua-Simon set out to find the lost Lois Weber film Cane Fire, which was shot on the Hawaiian island of Kaua’i. The 1934 talkie might contain the only moving image of his great-grandfather Alberto, a Filipino plantation worker who was an extra on the set. Banua-Simon quickly realizes that there is a far more significant connection between the plantation and the film industry. Banua-Simon’s Cane Fire meticulously reveals how cinema helped pave the way for the US government and the five families that controlled the plantations on Hawaii to increase their stranglehold over the archipelago. Films like Elvis Presley’s Blue Hawaii sold an image of Kaua’i as a paradise in which the locals were pushed into the background. As tourism supplanted sugarcane and pineapple plantations, the exploitation continued under this new guise. Banua-Simon’s film essay is a convincing and enraging portrait of a family and an island struggling to overcome generations of colonialism.