For years, Zoë Eisenberg has supported independent filmmaking in her East Hawaiʻi home. Now, a book and feature film debut brings her creative work into the spotlight.
Images by Andrew Richard Hara
In the film industry, it’s common to find multi-hyphenates such as writer-producer-director. Zoë Eisenberg, who does indeed inhabit these titles, boasts several more: novelist, aerialist, small business owner. Since moving to Kalapana in 2013, in the Puna region on the island of Hawai‘i, Eisenberg has seen her work flourish. She has produced 10 films, including Keli‘i Grace’s Ala Moana Boys and Erin Lau’s Inheritance, which was awarded the best Made in Hawaiʻi short at the 2022 Hawaiʻi International Film Festival. For the past few months, she’s been traveling to promote two projects: her debut novel Significant Others1 and her solo feature-length directorial debut Chaperone2, which premiered this year at Slamdance and brought home the Grand Jury Award for Breakouts. With a primarily Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander cast helmed by a Hawai‘i-based crew, Chaperone is special for another reason. It was developed in two different Creative Lab Hawai‘i incubators: the Producers Immersive in 2019 and the Directors Intensive in 2021. It was also created with the support of Hawaiʻi-based groups such as Hawaiʻi Women in Filmmaking, ʻOhina, and Sight and Sound. As such, it’s a film supported by a diverse network of independent filmmakers and creatives, illustrating the possibilities of the creative arts on our islands.
More importantly for Eisenberg, she has helped others realize those creative possibilities. In 2018, she co-founded the Made in Hawai‘i Film Festival, which featured cinema made in and about the islands in support of Hawai‘i’s independent films and filmmakers, and served as executive director until its closing in 2023. She also co-founded Aerial Arts Hawai‘i in 2017, a collective and production company for queer and allied East Hawaiʻi circus and burlesque performers that produces experiential circus acts across Hawaiʻi. In 2021 and with the growth of AAH, she opened The Airhouse, an event space and training studio in downtown Hilo that has become a hub for unique forms of self-expression in her island home.
I spoke to Eisenberg via Zoom, as she headed to another film festival featuring Chaperone. She was missing her quiet home and craving some solitude but little downtime is in her future. Coming up, she has a second book on the horizon, a feature-length script for Ty Sanga of Kūmau Productions, and the filming of Wanle, a short film adapted from one of the stories in my collection This Is Paradise.
In our conversation Eisenberg and I talked about the place of Hawai‘i, community-building, creating complex female characters, and what’s bringing us joy.
Kristiana Kahakauwila You’ve had a fantastic 2024 thus far, with your novel Significant Others dropping in February at the same time that Chaperone was premiering. What did it feel like to debut two huge projects?
Zoë Eisenberg I started both these projects in late 2018 to early 2019. I didn’t choose the release for either of them. Your publisher chooses the book release, and the film release was based entirely on what festival we got into. So, it was pretty surreal to be working on these two projects for so long and then have them appear in the world at the same time. To the outside it might look like, where did this come from? But for me I’ve been here in the jungle for the last five years trying to get these out.
KK In some ways it’s even been more than five years for your career as a novelist. You wrote your first novel in 2012 before you began producing films. How did that happen?
ZE I finished my first novel in 2012, but it didn’t sell to an editor. I think this was because I was — and still am — growing my craft and coming into my own voice. I’m actually reworking that manuscript now, and it’s been interesting to approach the same story with over a decade of experience between drafts. While I was working on the earlier version of that novel, I started dating the filmmaker who would eventually become my husband. He wanted to direct a film but didn’t have a script, so I wrote him one, and from there I began writing screenplays in tandem with fiction, and stepped into producing and directing in order to get our work made.
Screenwriting is a wildly different craft than fiction. It’s much more structured, and it took me some time, and several films, to understand the rules. Now that I am engaging with both mediums at once, they are often in conversation with each other. Incorporating screenplay structure into my fiction has definitely helped me become better at developing plot; I imagine this is why my fiction is now finding a home.
Love for me looks different than love looks for a lot of people, and I’ve learned that slowly throughout my adult life.
Zoë Eisenberg
KK Both Significant Others and Chaperone are set in Hawai‘i, and the politics of place play at the edges of these works. What’s your relationship to place, and to the place of Hawai‘i?
ZE My grandparents retired to Waikīkī, so I spent summers visiting them. And then my mother moved to Puna, where I now live, when I graduated from college. So, the simple answer is I ended up here by following family.
But it’s more complex than that. I’ve never been so inspired by a place. I’ve never felt so creatively nurtured by a place. But I also know that a lot of settlers come here and are inspired and feel nurtured, and that poses a lot of questions. As I’ve been here, I’ve found myself being a lot more community focused than I ever was in the past and I think it’s because it’s important for me to be generative here, not only in my own work but in what I’m giving back to this place so that I’m contributing and not just taking. One way is creating community and trying to help other people in this place feel seen and reflected.
KK I’m so glad you’ve brought up community. One of the hallmarks of your career — or, rather, careers — is your ability to gather and support others. What does community mean to you? And how did you come to a career that’s centered on community making?
ZE A large part of it is service. I found spaces that I felt like had a hole in them and I could see myself filling that. When I moved to Kalapana, I got into circus arts pretty much immediately because I found this amazingly talented group of circus artists. A lot of them are professionally trained. They live with their families or are farmers or stay-at-home moms, but they’re still training and, at the time, had nowhere to perform. I’m a producer so I knew I could help with that, I could get us performing.
It’s very similar with film. The film community has grown so much in the last 12 years. When I first moved here, I had a hard time finding community and tapping in, and I knew I couldn’t be the only person struggling to connect with other filmmakers. So, I asked, “How can I help to get us all together?” And that’s how Made in Hawai‘i Film Festival3 got started.
KK How would it have been different if you had been in Honolulu instead of on the island of Hawaiʻi?
In Honolulu, I think I would have been able to join other communities easier. Hawai‘i Filmmakers Collective started in 2014. Around that same time, HIFF started their Made in Hawai‘i program where they wanted to really focus on Hawai‘i-made films and our local creatives. So, it was in the zeitgeist. Other people were thinking and feeling the same thing.
There are a lot of Hawai‘i-born creatives who want to stay home and work and don’t want to have to move to LA or New York or any other film hubs. And they’re very talented, so there is this community-driven initiative to make sure that Hawai‘i can be a sustainable place to work. This is also how we’re going to ensure that Hawai‘i stories are being told by and about the people who actually live here.
KK One thing I admire about your novel Significant Others is that you trace how love changes. Often a story will focus on the lead up to a big love, or the aftermath of a break, but it’s rare to have a story that traces a full arc of before and after and sustaining beyond. So, I’m really interested in how you write love.
ZE Love for me looks different than love looks for a lot of people, and I’ve learned that slowly throughout my adult life.4 I know now that the way I develop and pursue friendships is a lot more romantic, and by the word “romantic” I mean an expression of love. My friendships tend to be more romantic in terms of my attention on people and my focus and my celebration of my loved ones, even if it’s not a romantic love. I also don’t view the end of a relationship as a failed relationship. I think that’s because I have three parents. My stepmother has been in my life since I was twelve. Her relationship with my father is so beautiful, and her relationship with my mother is beautiful, too. I’m really affirmed that my parents had a beautiful love for 25 years, and then went on to have other beautiful loves. And I bring all that into my work.
KK I’m interested in the intersection of love and desire. Your stories feature complex women who are making choices often against their best interest but out of this incredibly strong desire, one that borders on need.
ZE We’re all trying to get our needs met. That looks different for different people. And we don’t always realize what we’re doing while we’re doing that. I find myself drawn to stories about women who are trying to achieve some kind of control through secrecy. In Significant Others, Jess is engaging in deceptive behavior because she’s scared. In Chaperone, Misha is engaging in deceptive behavior because it’s been so long since she’s felt seen. The only way she thinks she can be seen is through pursuing this relationship that is duplicitous and problematic.
KK And on a story level, how do you think about consequences? Because you write beautiful and complex consequences.
ZE I have always been the person my friends tell their secrets to. I think I’m able to hold that space for my characters, too, where I’m not judging them. So that allows me to not handhold the audience or make overly moralistic story arcs. All of our choices have consequences, and I love following that domino effect, but I don’t always feel that a character needs to learn or grow. I view Significant Others as a comedy because the characters grow and change whereas Chaperone is a tragedy because the character doesn’t.
KK You’ve co-written, with Alison Week, a new screenplay that’s set to begin filming this summer. I’m pretty excited about this short film because it’s an adaptation of one of my stories and because you’re working with a number of women I admire, such as director Lisette Marie Flanary and producer Camille Muth. How is writing an adaptation different from working on your own original screenplay?
ZE The Wanle short script was the easiest script I have ever written because the story was there and the structure of that story is really great. So, thanks for that. (Laughs.) It wasn’t only that it was the easiest writing process I’ve ever had but it also was the best received script I’ve ever written. It’s placing in so many contests, and the accolades for the project are stacked, which surprised us — not because we don’t think this project is a knockout, but because the birthing process had been so comparatively easy.
When I co-wrote the short with Alison, the hardest thing for us was to go through the original story and pull out only certain scenes because the short has to be so short. Now we’re deep into expanding the short script into a feature, and that’s very different because we need to expand Wanle’s world beyond what is already in the short story.
Filmmaking strikes me as incredibly collaborative. Writing a book, for me at least, is so solo. When you’re collaborating, how do you make sure you hear your own voice? And when you’re solo, how do you stay connected?
Fiction is my first love, and it’s what I spend the most time doing, but it’s isolating. It takes so long to see any fruit from your labor, particularly if the fruit looks like published work. If I didn’t have circus and film, which are both more social and collaborative, I would be a lot less happy.
In terms of voice, directing is still relatively new to me. Chaperone is the fourth film I’ve directed but the first feature I’ve directed by myself, so it’s still new to me to be like this is my voice, this is my vision. Also, I like surrounding myself with people who are really smart and capable and talented so I can learn from them. I believe the best idea wins. Thus, for directing at least, it’s about bringing on people who respect my voice and like my vision and want to support my learning and growing. Sometimes it takes awhile to find who those people are.
KK It’s been a joy to talk with you. Can you tell me what’s bringing you joy right now?
ZE This conversation! But also, it’s great to have Chaperone in the world because so many people had pivotal roles in making it. To have it get into Slamdance5. To have it truly be an underdog but go on to win big. This is great for many different people, not just me. For our producers, and our actors, and the folks who helped finance it and put a lot of faith in it. It feels like a project that was made by many in the community, so it’s a joy to see it succeeding.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
- The Hilo-set story follows Jess and Ren, a pair of co-dependent besties in their 30s, as they navigate their friendship following a one-night stand and an unexpected pregnancy. ↩︎
- Another Hilo-set narrative with messy characters confronting the challenges of adulthood that centers on 29-year-old Misha gets involved in an eyebrow-raising romance with an 18-year-old high schooler, who thinks she’s a fellow senior from another school. ↩︎
- Other notable alumni include Ciara Lacy’s This Is the Way We Rise and Alika Tengan’s Molokaʻi Bound. ↩︎
- Eiseinberg got the idea in 2018 while reflecting upon the female friendships of her 20s and early 30s. “Because the relationship was platonic, I would have no real way to mourn them because I didn’t have a model for what I was going through,” she said in an interview with the Hawaiʻi Review of Books. ↩︎
- An annual showcase of emerging and indie talent that is famous for launching the careers of Christopher Nolan and Lena Dunham. ↩︎