On the evening of October 2, a room at the Kona Elks Lodge will go dark and a film will begin with a sentence that sounds less like a synopsis than a genealogy: before there were maps, there were ancestors. The film is "Kūpuna ʻĀina," the Hawaiʻi chapter of an ambitious documentary project that has taken its makers around the world, and its premiere here is being hosted by a Big Island nonprofit whose work is woven into the story on screen.
The event is free, but seats must be reserved in advance. Doors open at 6 p.m., the film begins at 7 p.m., and a live question-and-answer session follows at 8 p.m. Questions and RSVPs go to [email protected]. Donations, while not required, are welcomed at the door or online.
The venue is listed at 75-170 Hualālai Road in Kailua-Kona, the address of the Kona Elks Lodge #2616. It is the kind of unglamorous, multipurpose community hall where a great deal of Big Island civic life actually happens, and now, a film premiere.
"Kūpuna ʻĀina" runs about an hour and twelve minutes and is directed by Zaya Benazzo and Maurizio Benazzo, the married couple who founded Science and Nonduality, the organization known almost universally as SAND. The film listens to the heartbeat of Hawaiʻi through the voices of kūpuna, or elders, alongside cultural practitioners and contemporary warriors working to reclaim language, land, and ancestral knowledge. Its subject is not scenery but reclamation: the revitalization of language, the recovery of ancestral rhythms, and what the filmmakers describe as the kuleana — the sacred duty — to secure a living future for generations not yet born.
The Benazzos' path to Hawaiʻi is a long one. Maurizio grew up in Italy and arrived in the United States in 1984 aboard a ninety-eight-year-old sailing boat. He worked as an actor, model, and filmmaker, but by his own account his thirst for knowledge was not satisfied until 2001, when he encountered "I Am That," the seminal work by the Indian sage Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, while in India shooting the award-winning documentary "Short Cut to Nirvana." Zaya Ralitza Benazzo was born and raised in Sofia, Bulgaria, and holds degrees in engineering, environmental science, and film; she spent years as an environmental activist in Europe before turning to filmmaking. The two met in 2007, and their first project together was "Rays of the Absolute," a documentary on Nisargadatta Maharaj's life and teachings. That collaboration led to SAND, a global community and nonprofit built at the crossroads of timeless wisdom traditions, modern science, and direct experience. The couple now lives and works in Sebastopol, California, on the unceded ancestral lands of the Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo people.
Their filmography has grown to include "The Wisdom of Trauma," made with Dr. Gabor Maté, and "Where Olive Trees Weep," a searing portrait of Palestinian life under Israeli occupation. But it is "The Eternal Song" that brought them to Hawaiʻi. In May 2022, a small film crew began traveling the world to explore the devastating impact of colonization on Indigenous peoples, lands, and cultures. What began as a single feature organically evolved into something much larger: a collection of twelve additional feature-length documentaries, each honoring the unique story of one Indigenous community the crew visited. The series' stated vision is to honor Indigenous resilience, illuminate sacred wisdom held for humanity and the Earth, and invite healing across communities facing trauma and colonial erasure. Communities shared their journeys of healing intergenerational trauma while preserving culture, language, and ceremonies rooted in a profound relationship to land and ancestral wisdom.
"Kūpuna ʻĀina" is the Hawaiʻi installment of that collection. Its framing is deliberately unsentimental. The promotional language for the premiere puts it bluntly: this is not the Hawaiʻi from postcards. The film's narrative arc reaches back before maps and before written history to a primordial longing — a collective breath blowing across the water, calling Hawaiʻi up from beneath the sea. That longing, in the film's telling, outlasted empires, survived erasure, and endured a century of quiet war waged through the suppression of language, the banning of hula, and the theft of land. Historical pain, the filmmakers suggest, is alchemized into power — not despite the wound, but through it.
What makes the Kona premiere more than a screening is the presence of Humanity Hale, the Hawaiʻi Island nonprofit hosting the evening. Humanity Hale provides free, trauma-informed support programs for island youth, rooted in culture, healing, and community. Its services include Hawaiian arts and cultural education, art therapy and expressive healing, group and individual trauma-informed therapy, a fully staffed community center for healing and culture care, and transitional housing for young people aging out of foster care. The organization's own framing is unflinching: wounds are not always your fault, but moving forward is how healing is found — and no one should walk that journey alone. Its guiding phrase, "E mālama kākou i nā keiki o ka ʻāina," translates as "let us care for the children of this land."
That mission is not incidental to the film. Humanity Hale's work is spotlighted within "Kūpuna ʻĀina," which means the premiere functions as something of a homecoming: a documentary made by two filmmakers from Northern California about the healing work of a Big Island organization, screened for the community it depicts, in a lodge hall a short drive from the coastline the film keeps returning to.
The pairing of SAND and Humanity Hale is also a neat illustration of how the Benazzos' project has evolved. When they began, SAND was known primarily for gatherings exploring the convergence of science and nondual spiritual traditions. Over the years, as Zaya Benazzo has put it in interviews, the organization's focus widened to include trauma, somatic healing, feminine and earth-oriented teachings, and Indigenous wisdom — a shift she describes as recognizing that healing never ends, that it is a lifelong journey with no modern fix. "We are constantly being guided if we just listen," she has said. Maurizio has been more aphoristic about it: "There is no spiritual work. Period. Everything is spiritual work. It's life."
For anyone who wants to see what that looks like when it is pointed at a specific place — at a specific island, with a specific language to recover and a specific generation of children to care for — the doors at the Kona Elks Lodge open at 6 p.m. on October 2. The film starts at 7. The conversation, presumably, continues well past 8.