Cane Fire: Film + Discussion

Kauaʻi is seen as a paradise of leisure and natural beauty, but these escapist fantasies obscure the colonial displacement, hyper-exploitation of workers, and destructive environmental extraction that have shaped life on the island for the last 250 years. In Cane Fire, director Anthony Banua-Simon critically examines the island’s history—and the ways in which Hollywood has represented it—through four generations of  his family, whose forebears immigrated to Kauaʻi from the Philippines to work on the sugar plantations. Banua-Simon’s observational footage, amateur YouTube travelogues, and epic Hollywood dance sequences come together to offer a kaleidoscopic portrait of the economic and cultural forces that have cast Indigenous and working-class residents as "extras" in their own story.