Island Enterprises

Many summer weekends of my childhood were spent gazing out the backseat window while my parents drove along Kamehameha Highway toward the northern coast of O‘ahu. Acres of pineapple, sugarcane, and coffee harvested by the Dole Plantation stretched in either direction, shooting from the red dirt I always associated with my maternal grandparents’ backyards in Mililani and Wahiawā. When they were teenagers in territorial Hawai‘i, they worked on these fields, like many locals of their generation, implicated in the oligarchy of agricultural corporations known as the “Big Five.” Such corporations dispossessed Native Hawaiians of their land and wielded economic power by investing in and controlling shipping, banking, and wholesale distribution, simultaneously accruing political authority. Company executives cycled through territorial offices, advancing pro-business policy and ultimately statehood in 1959.

Meanwhile, a parallel import of consolidation emerged in American cinema for the islands. Through its vertically integrated control of production, distribution, and exhibition, Hollywood codified the narration of nation-building in films for mass entertainment, aestheticizing American expansion as a spectacular inevitability. By 1940, at least 26 films were fully or partially produced in Hawai‘i, many of which were South Seas fantasies, military dramas, and mass ornament musicals. One of these films, Lois Weber’s White Heat (1934), was rumored to have featured filmmaker Anthony Banua-Simon’s great-grandfather Albert, a Filipino immigrant and labor organizer, as an extra while filming in Kaua‘i—becoming one of many narrative threads interwoven into his debut feature Cane Fire (2020). Believing that Hollywood films had left local audiences with limited material to imagine the interconnected, though distinct lives of Native Hawaiian and immigrant plantation workers beyond their conditions of containment, Banua-Simon set out to make something else of it. His newest experimental short, World Enterprises (2026), considers what counternarratives could emerge from Hawai‘i’s Hollywood film archive once unbound from its original form. 

World Enterprises, which was on display at the Honolulu contemporary gallery ‘Aupuni Space between February and March 2026, reanimates a film subscription program of the same title screened in the 1940s at the Kekaha sugar plantation located on the west side of Kaua‘i. Comprising 46 weeks of programming and over a hundred black-and-white titles, ranging from ripoff-Disney Van Beuren animations to John Wayne westerns, “World Enterprises” was screened for the island’s multiethnic plantation workers during their Sunday reprieve from grueling planting and harvest. Banua-Simon’s family—who migrated from Puerto Rico and the Philippines to work for the Big Five company Alexander & Baldwin for four generations on Kaua‘i plantations—likely would have watched many of these films. Sourced entirely from the original program, with the exception of a live analog score composed by ethnomusicologist Paul Cosme, Banua-Simon’s 14-minute short film cleverly recomposes Hollywood scenes of hegemonic power into a rollicking, unmistakenly poetic critique about the genesis of agricultural production. Undergirding his mixtape of clichéd scenes of discovery and encounter, commercial announcements eagerly inaugurating the construction of plantations, and thrillingly precarious frontier romances, is a narrative structure challenging how films have historically framed the process of settler colonialism as progress.

The Hawai‘i plantation industry, drawing workers from its native population, Japan, Okinawa, Portugal, China, and Korea, and beyond, required tight managerial control in order to bound land, capital, and governance into a single agricultural apparatus. Ronald Takaki, author of Pau Hana: Plantation Life and Labor in Hawaii, explains that plantation owners strategically invested in entertainment and recreation to assimilate their multilingual, multiethnic labor force, and mitigate upheaval and unrest. Already in 1910, the vice president of H. Hackfield and Company, another Big Five company, claimed that movies provided plantation managers “magnificent results… not only in holding the laborer on the plantation, but in preventing strikes.” Considering that “World Enterprises” was distributed in Kekaha shortly after the Filipino labor union Vibora Luviminda organized a strike that increased wages for sugar workers in Maui, it’s not unreasonable to assume such calculated timing.

Interspersed throughout the shorts are mid-century public-service advertisements, mainly promotional reels for the DuPont Chemical industry, that extoll pesticides and industrialization as pathways to what one title frame declares, “The Road to Health and Happiness.” Quite unsubtly, these ads featured Frankensteinian laboratories and belching smokestacks, motifs of biotechnology that Banua-Simon readily invokes for audiences to compare the material realities of our time. Of the current events that World Enterprises beckons us to witness, the ongoing land struggles of Indigenous peoples, especially that of Kānaka Maoli, is most salient. When I had watched World Enterprises for the first time, the ongoing Red Hill fuel crisis, and the Standing Rock Sioux’s decade-long fight over the Dakota Access Pipeline, came to the fore, perhaps indicative of the film’s ability to coincide temporalities in a way that is both uneasy and surreal. Even then, one doesn’t need to look further than the recent two cyclones that swept across the islands on back-to-back weekends—during which the near failure of the Dole-Food Co.-owned Wahiawā Dam jeopardized 2,500 residents and their homes on the North Shore. The film program’s currents of stubborn New Deal-era optimism, that there’s “prosperity around the corner” as Edward Nugent would repeat to the cameraman in Girl O’ My Dreams (1934), telegraphs bitter irony, having arrived at a present where the recurrence of environmental catastrophe has seemed to collapse its meaning. 

The percussive line of kulintang, at the heart of the score composed by Cosme and featuring saxophonist Gustavo D’Amico and vibraphonist Kev Calamayan, propels the film’s futurity with instrumentation native to the Philippines. It’s perhaps apt here to return to the 1937 strike organized by Vibora Luviminda, to consider how the kulintang, counteracting the tawdry (even if nostalgic) original scores, echoes the particular insurgency and struggle of Filipino workers and their solidarities with other laborers at the time. Such eccentric sonic storytelling for Banua-Simon isn’t unprecedented: in Cane Fire, he deftly mixes found footage both amateur and professional, his own filmmaking around Kaua‘i’s communities, and Hollywood scores. The mixtape-like quality of World Enterprises is an extension of its fragmented poetics, both crucial in making possible futurities legible through the friction of its parts.

Not too long before I watched Cane Fire for the first time, fires ravaged the town of Lahaina, once the capital of the Hawaiian kingdom. Refusing the narrative that the fires were a natural disaster, Native Hawaiian attorneys U‘ilani Tanigawa Lum and Kaulu Lu‘uwai instead argue that the fires were “the consequence of over 150 years of rapacious land and natural resource management practices.” Such environmental and infrastructural abuses call to mind Dole’s mismanagement of the Wahiawā Dam that had exacerbated the recent North Shore floods. Similarly reframing how our present is a consequence of such mismanagement, World Enterprises conveys just how easily time and history fold—the diegetic time of the original films, the material conditions of their 1940 screenings in Kekaha, and the status quo collide before us. “So on with progress,” a commercial narrator neatly concludes in the final frame, but by then we’ve hopefully taken off the rose-colored glasses so that myth-making no longer renders.