Doors 7:00p
Program 7:30p
Tickets $12

UnionDocs
352 Onderdonk Ave
Ridgewood, NY

We’re thrilled to welcome Anthony Banua-Simon to UnionDocs for an evening of cinema and conversation! We’ll begin with a screening of Banua-Simon’s recent found footage short WORLD ENTERPRISES and continues with an in-progress presentation of his feature The Pink Palace, a project that expands from the themes introduced in the short. Through preliminary documentary footage, archival video, photos, and research, Banua-Simon will narrate the project to be produced in the coming year.

The Pink Palace is a documentary / fiction hybrid built from both historical archive and scripted scenes produced within unsanctioned and occasionally improvised contemporary settings. The film takes place at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Waikiki on Oʻahu. In a narrative alternating between 1939 and the current day, the film follows the “Golden Man” (in mocking reverence to author James A. Michener), a mysterious public relations agent employed by shipping company and hotel owner, Matson, and tasked with creating and maintaining an ever-evolving construct of Hawaiʻi that caters to tourism and a growing U.S. military empire. The film links historical figures such as Georgia O‘Keeffe, General Douglas MacArthur, Hawaiian activist Sammy Amalu, and Filipino actress Isabel Rosario Cooper in an absurdist plot among the real-life current day backdrop of hotel union strikes and the RIMPAC military exercises.

The Pink Palace is an extension of themes and histories examined in Banua-Simon’s documentaries Cane Fire, The Experiment Station, WORLD ENTERPRISES, as well as his ongoing video essay series based on the book by Delia Caparoso Konzett, Hollywood’s Hawaii: Race, Nation and War. These projects are critical analyses that dissect existing materials and utilize oral histories and The Pink Palace will be extending this knowledge into the speculative realm, resulting in an original work that can act as an exponent to further inquiry.

Come through!

Program

The Pink Palace

In-progress feature length, 45 min presentation

The Hawaiʻi of 1939 and today converge into a transhistorical blend of fiction and documentary film as a mysterious public relations agent residing in the Royal Hawaiian Hotel is tasked with maintaining the island’s unraveling image.

WORLD ENTERPRISES

14 mins, 2026

In 1940, on the dry westside of the Hawaiian island of Kauaʻi, the Kekaha Sugar Company began a six-month mail-order film subscription with World Enterprises, a distributor sponsored by the charitable trust and foundation of Castle & Cooke, one of the “Big Five” sugar companies. 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 program screened for workers on their Sundays off from harvesting and processing sugarcane.

Program Duration: 60 mins

Bios

Anthony Banua-Simon is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and editor who’s a 2024 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Video/Film. He was also 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 documentary project, The Experiment Station, has received support 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).