This virtual event is FREE. You will have access HERE to the film from February 7, 2021, to February 10, 2021, including a pre-recorded Q&A with filmmaker Anthony Banua-Simon.
Called one of 2020’s most exciting documentary films by IndieWire, Cane Fire will be presented in a special screening by the Coleman Center for the Arts.
The Hawaiian island of Kauai 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 has 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 Kauai 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.
Cane Fire opens the Coleman Center for the Art participation in the Southern Circuit Tour of Independent Filmmakers, a South Arts program. Since its inception in 1975, Southern Circuit has brought some of the best independent filmmakers and their films from around the country to communities throughout the South. The program is supported by the National Endowment for the Arts.
Upcoming films include Warrior Women, directed by Christina D. King and Elizabeth A. Castle and Socks on Fire, directed by Gasden-based Bo McGuire.