An oral history of Kohala as told by residents of the area during the final years of its sugar plantation era will be presented today and Tuesday at the Lyman Museum in Hilo.
“This Is Kohala” is a half-hour documentary created by the Kohala Oral History Project, made up of interviews with more than 20 Kohala residents as a way to preserve the history of a time and place that is increasingly lost to time.
“I was born and raised in Kohala before I moved to the Bay Area,” said Jocelyn Manuel, co-producer of the film. “We would come back and visit every year … but my dad passed away before he could share his stories about what Kohala was like in the sugar plantation days.”
In 2019, Manuel began recording her mother’s stories about moving to the area in the 1960s. Soon, after Manuel’s son got into film school, they started filming the stories together.
After posting some clips of those stories on social media, Manuel found some interest in a wider series of interviews with Kohala kupuna. After a few aborted attempts to set up a series of interviews — which were disrupted largely due to the impacts of COVID-19 — Manuel and her son eventually recorded interviews with 24 residents between 2021 and 2022.
Interview subjects shared about life on the plantation, how plantation work dominated their lives and living conditions, and, eventually, how the end of the Kohala Sugar Company in 1975 changed everything.
“It’s about preserving our legacy for our children and our community,” Manuel said. “It’s a story about resilience. … It shows that everybody is a part of history.
“One of the people we interviewed, Saturnino Carpio, he used to work with my dad,” Manuel went on. “So, he told me stories about working with him, and that was very poignant for me.”
Another interview subject, Fred Cachola, spoke for hours with barely any prompting, and was a “wonderful storyteller,” Manuel said. Unfortunately, Cachola died before the film could be completed. The final product is dedicated to him.
“I tell my students to think about the Library of Alexandria,” said Hawaii Community College lecturer Bryan Campbell, who edited the documentary along with several HCC students. “Or Indiana Jones, you know, preserving these pieces of history. But the difference is, that statue that Indy steals from a temple, that will still be there in 1,000 years, but for us, if we don’t record this knowledge now, it’ll be lost. We’re always losing stories every day.”
Campbell, himself a documentary filmmaker, said he was brought onto the project unusually late, and consequently wasn’t involved in any of the filming process, but was left to sort out hours of raw interview footage into a coherent product. Despite this, he said, the interviews provided such a strong picture of the time and place that he was able to get a sense of the area despite having never visited Kohala before the project.
“Oral history history is a very important, yet overlooked, method of recording history,” Campbell said. “It’s very democratic. It lets everyone tell their own experiences, but for the film, I selected bits where their stories overlapped.”
Eventually, the film was compressed down to a little under half an hour, with simple interview footage intercut with archival photos and videos from decades past.
This eventually caused its own set of problems, Manuel said: When PBS Hawaii aired the film earlier this year, much of the archival material had to be replaced with material the filmmakers could secure the rights to on short notice.
“We never really planned for this to be aired,” Manuel laughed, although she added that the final changes were ultimately minor.
Manuel said the Kohala Oral History Project will continue to interview residents for their stories and potential future documentaries.
The Lyman Museum in Hilo will screen the film today from 7 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. and on Tuesday from 3 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. Manuel will host the first screening and Campbell the second. Admission is free to museum members and $3 for nonmembers.