Wednesday, May 13

EA (Sovereign), co-directed by Noah Keone Viernes and Sancia Miala Shiba Nash, is a feature length documentary about Keʻeaumoku Kapu, a Kanaka ʻŌiwi (Native Hawaiian) community leader, activist, and caretaker of Nā ʻAikāne o Maui Cultural Center in Lahaina, on the island of Maui. The Kapu family gives voice to a multi-generational struggle to perpetuate native land and water management practices, stifled for over a century by plantation agriculture, the U.S. backed overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom, militourism and real estate development. Drawing these events into a genealogical frame for family experience, memories and dreams, the story embodies the Hawaiian phrase “I ka wa ma mua, ka wa ma hope” (the future is in the past). Archival and contemporary projections of community link songs, chants, animations, digital cartography, field recordings, legal texts and interviews into a reflection on Kapuʻs nearly 20-year battle, in and out of the U.S. court system, to reclaim his ancestral land in Kauaʻula valley. Ea is a testament to the resilience of one family, whose efforts serve as a source of guidance for their community as well as future generations pursuing land and water rights across the Hawaiian archipelago.