A young Oliver Kupau with his grandparents who raised him, James Kalamahiai and Kaleikaukeha Naoho Kupau of Wai'anae. - Photo: Courtesy of Ann Marie Kirk, Blue Crater Media

Finding grandfather
Award-winning filmmaker turns lens on her tūtū

By Lisa Asato / Ka Wai Ola

Native Hawaiian filmmaker Anne Marie Kirk has always been a storyteller – of other people's stories. Now she's turning the camera closer to home. Not quite on herself, but on her late grandfather, Oliver Homealani Kupau, who was widely known in the Hawaiian community as “Colonel Kupau,” for having risen to the rank of lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army, “one of the highest ranking officers of Hawaiian ancestry at the time – we're talking '30s, '40s and '50s,” says Kirk.

Anne Marie Kirk

But it's not his military career, or his nationally recognized marksmanship or any big, headline-grabbing reason that pulled Kirk to her subject. It's just simple step in self-discovery. “I was in film school at UCLA and my mother, Jessica Maile, had found 16mm film my grandfather had shot in the 1940s, '50s and early '60s,” Kirk recalls. “I had no idea this film existed. I had no idea he shot film.” Watching it in video format, the reel revealed “fantastic footage of the family in Kalihi and Waiāhole and of different parts of the island and the continental U.S.”

“The strange thing is,” she adds, “I was born the year my grandfather died, and I feel his love of storytelling imagery and film passed on to me.”

Now midway through the making of her planned 30- to 45-minute film, Kirk has interviewed family members and is now seeking the help of others who knew her grandfather and was affected by him. Help has already started coming in – in the form of a packet of photos from someone who served alongside her grandfather in the Army: “That was an enormous gift, which will help in the storytelling of this film,” says Kirk, whose work includes the intimate portrait of the 90-year-old Ruth Kaholoa'a of Waipi'o Valley, on Hawai'i, Happy Birthday, Tūtū Ruth, which won a national award for documentary.

Kupau, born in Hau'ula in 1899 – a year after annexation – saw Hawai'i become a territory and then a state. He was raised in Wai'anae by his fraternal grandparents and spent his post-high school years living with and helping support his mother, Sarah Cullen, in Kalihi. He graduated from Kamehameha Schools in 1918, following in the footsteps of his father, Lowell Kupau. There, Oliver Kupau mentored “numerous young people” in marksmanship and business, and also was “very influential to many young Hawaiian men by guiding them to military life,” Kirk says. “I would like to hear from them.”

In the meantime, she has her grandfather's archives to delve into: files filled with newspaper articles about Hawai'i's history, letters he received as a young man attending Kamehameha Schools, and detailed accounts of everything from his daily expenses to military career. There's also the 78 rpm of him singing Aloha 'Oe with Mulan Naiwi, uncovered after talking with kūpuna who described his penchant for singing. “It is absolutely amazing to hear him sing, to hear his voice,” says Kirk. “Chicken skin.”

The film will debut for family members in 2009 and then be entered in film festivals. The fill will be titled Homealani, after Kupau's middle name. “Through the years, the family has lost the meaning of this name, and I love the mystery of that because the film itself is a mystery – trying to reveal the story of Oliver Homealani Kupau,” she says.

To share your memories of Oliver Kupau, contact Kirk at 371-3072 or homealani@gmail.com.