WORLD ENTERPRISES
Anthony Banua-Simon

February 27–March 28, 2026

Opening Reception: February 27, 6pm

Live Score Performance + Panel Discussion: March 14, 7pm

Aupuni Space is pleased to present WORLD ENTERPRISES, a film installation by award-winning filmmaker 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. The films, produced on the continent, ranged from John Wayne westerns and anti-union public service announcements to DuPont Chemical industrial shorts. 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. These narratives attempted to codify American absorption as inevitable—meanwhile Asian immigrant laborers were actively exploring socialist futures that incorporated Kānaka Maoli sovereignty and imagined an independent, multiracial nation.

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. The brazen promotion of harmful chemicals developed by DuPont that featured in the program remains particularly relevant, given their ongoing impact on both the environment and the health of residents of Kauaʻi.

When this program was originally shown, Hawaiʻi workers were navigating a period of intense upheaval: an early strike victory in 1937 by the Filipino labor union, Vibora Luviminda, was followed by police violence during the 1938 Hilo Massacre, when unarmed strikers were fired upon. It wouldn't be until after WWII that the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) would consolidate a diverse and militant membership—laying the groundwork for what would become one of Hawaiʻi’s most effective working-class housing initiatives of the twentieth century. In 1940, however, workers living in plantation camps continued to organize and strategize despite escalating harassment and red-baiting from the “Big Five” sugar barons.

Through sampled material, Banua-Simon draws moments of rupture and levity, culminating in an explicit “cut-up poem” provocation. The reconstructed work reflects on community amid political defeat while pointing toward a revolutionary movement just beneath the surface. The installation features an analog live score by composer Paul Cosme, led by the traditional percussive kulintang instrument originating in the Philippines, with Gustavo D’Amico on saxophone and Kev Calamayan on vibraphone.


Anthony Banua-Simon
Anthony Banua-Simon is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and editor who’s a 2024 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Video/Film. Named one of Filmmaker Magazine's 2021 "25 New Faces of Independent Film" and DOC NYC's 2022 "40 Under 40,” his debut feature documentary, Cane Fire, was an official selection of the 2020 Hot Docs International Film Festival as well as the 2021 MoMA Doc Fortnight and won "Best Documentary Feature" at the 2020 Indie Memphis Film Festival and the 2021 Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival. Cane Fire is distributed theatrically by Cinema Guild and was available to stream on The Criterion Channel. The film has received praise in RogerEbert.com, The Wrap, Jacobin, Film Threat, and Hyperallergic among several other outlets.

His short documentary about two former workers of the Domino Sugar Refinery, Third Shift, won "Best Short Documentary" at the 2014 Brooklyn Film Festival and was previously streaming on The Criterion Channel. He's featured in The New York Times, BOMB Magazine, Screen Slate, Pioneer Works Broadcast, and HuffPost.

Anthony attended The Evergreen State College and was a fellow at the UnionDocs Collaborative Studio Program. He taught film editing at The State University of New York at Purchase and was a member of the volunteer-run Spectacle Theater in Brooklyn, NY. His current project, The Experiment Station, has received funding from both NYSCA and the Jerome Foundation. Occasionally, he's asked to list his favorite films The Criterion Collection Top 10, Grasshopper Film 10/10.

Paul Cosme
Award-winning composer/scholar Paul Cosme (b. 2000) conjures “wonderfully surreal” (The Classical Network) and “inventive” (Town Topics) sound worlds in his search for home through the interstices of Asian and Western music traditions through composition, performance, and research.

In weaving together Classical, rock, and world music traditions, he collaborates with groundbreaking artists and collectives such as GRAMMY-winning New Jersey Symphony, GRAMMY-nominated JACK Quartet, Pulitzer Prize-winning Raven Chacón, United States Artists Fellow and taiko master Kenny Endo, kulintang artist Ron “kulintronica” Querian, among others. His current project is a contemporary dance suite inspired by traditional Mindanaoan dance movements and heavy metal rock for Philippine cultural artistic collective, House of Gongs, utilizing the kulintang ensemble, electric stringed instruments, and Western percussion.

His border-defying works gained recognition at home and abroad with institutions like the Philippine National Commission on Culture and the Arts, the Asian Composers League, American Choral Directors Association, Edward T. Cone Institute at Princeton University, and Beth Morrison Projects in New York.

Cosme pursues a PhD in Composition at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa as a Fellow at the East-West Center and recipient of the John C. Young Award for Arts and Letters. As an ethnomusicologist, Cosme’s interests lie in conceptualizing intraculturality, and the engagement of the human and nonhuman in music practices across Southeast Asia, particularly avant-garde music, ritual, and gong-chime traditions of the region, which papers are published in journals in the Philippines and internationally such as Musika Jornal and Asian Music.