Cane Fire

synopsis

The Hawaiian island of Kaua'i is seen as a paradise of leisure and pristine natural beauty, but these escapist fantasies obscure the colonial displacement, hyper-exploitation of workers and destructive environmental extraction that have actually shaped life on the island for the last 250 years. Cane Fire critically examines the island's history - and the various strategies by which Hollywood has represented it - through four generations of director Anthony Banua-Simon's family, who first immigrated to Kaua'i from the Philippines to work on the sugar plantations. Assembled from a diverse array of sources - from Banua-Simon's observational footage, to amateur YouTube travelogues, to epic Hollywood dance sequences - Cane Fire offers a kaleidoscopic portrait of the economic and cultural forces that have cast Indigenous and working-class residents as "extras" in their own story.