The Hawaiian island of Kauaʻi 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 Kauaʻi 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.

Director Q&A will be moderated by Jeff Chang

Jeff Chang’s first book Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, was named one of the best nonfiction books of the last quarter century by Slate. A revised Young Adult edition of the book—co-written with legendary hip-hop journalist Dave “Davey D” Cook—was published in 2021. His other books include Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip-Hop, Who We Be: A Cultural History of Race in Post Civil Rights America), and We Gon' Be Alright: Notes On Race and Resegregation. His next project is a cultural biography of Bruce Lee called Water Mirror Echo: Bruce Lee and the Making of Asian America (HarperCollins). Considered a leading expert in narrative strategy and cultural equity, he serves as a Senior Advisor at Race Forward and runs the Butterfly Lab for Immigrant Narrative Strategy.