I have been working for some time on a short film script titled “Kapi’olani” about a Hawaiian princess who lived 200 years ago. She was an early adopter of Christianity.
She had a traumatic experience when she was about 10 years old that affected her for the rest of her life. The experience was due to the cruel kapu religion that had been brought to Hawaii from Tahiti about 500 years earlier.
This short film would be a “proof of concept” for a feature-length film titled “Rainbow Over the Ocean” about the Hawaiian nobility that did away with kapu before the missionaries came to Hawaii.
A popular misconception is that the missionaries, which first arrived on Hawaii Island from Boston in 1820, took the Hawaiians’ religion and culture from them. The truth, as usual, is more complicated.
The Hawaiians themselves did away with kapu, which included human sacrifice, approximately six months before the missionaries arrived. During that six months, Hawaii essentially had no religion, and once the missionaries came, the Hawaiians adopted Christianity en masse. There was even a period in the 1840s when the largest Christian church in the world was in Hilo here on Hawaii Island, my adopted home.
I’m working toward producing the short film here near where the actual events occurred. You can read the synopsis here.
