WORLD ENTERPRISES

Directed by

Anthony Banua-Simon

In 1940, on the dry westside of Kauaʻi, the Kekaha Sugar Company began a six-month mail-order film subscription with World Enterprises, an Oʻahu-based distributor—screening films for workers on their Sundays off from harvesting and processing sugarcane. Varied in style, the films shared a common theme: American power taming lands and peoples of the “frontier” through extraction, an encroachment justified by declared ideals of progress. WORLD ENTERPRISES is a collage of radical possibilities sourced entirely from the original 1940 film program. Recontextualized by Banua-Simon, the short compilation enters a dreamlike conversation with both the material realities of the moment of its creation and the present day, culminating in an explicit “cut-up poem” provocation that reflects on community amid political defeat while pointing toward a revolutionary movement just beneath the surface.