About the Film
In Hawai'i, the highly prized lychee tree blooms only once a year. Paranoid Arnie and Ethel vow to protect their fruit from lychee thieves...at any cost!
Arnie and Ethel's feelings of suspicion are stirred when a Hawaiian stranger named Keoki (Pomaika'i Brown, 50 First Dates) offers to harvest their lychee. When Arnie's selfish impulses drive him to hire professional pickers for the task instead, Keoki realizes that their lives are being dictated by fear, and attempts to set things right.
Lychee Thieves explores the humorous, and sometimes contentious, interactions among the culturally and ethnically diverse people of Hawai’i, prompting one critic to describe it as "the most accurate depiction of life in Hawai'i yet committed to film." Inventive dream sequences take us from the mystical valleys of Hawai’i to ancient China, where a smitten Emperor will stop at nothing to feed his lady’s lust for lychee.
Written and directed by award-winning local filmmaker Kathleen Man Gyllenhaal, Lychee Thieves features hi-definition cinematography by Independent Spirit Award Nominee, Anne Misawa (Treeless Mountain) and a haunting original score by German composer Emanuel Heinstein. The soundtrack also includes Hawaiian favorites by acclaimed musical artists Makana, Hapa, and Raiatea Helm. Showcasing a vibrant local cast, with a seasoned crew helmed by producer Angela Laprete, Lychee Thieves delights and inspires audiences around the globe.
Director’s Statement
It was late June in 2008, when I started to get an acute feeling of anticipation. But for what? And then it dawned on me; it was almost lychee season. My favorite fruit – no, food – of all time was ripening. Soon, everyone would start scrambling to get their hands on some before the short-lived harvest was over.
My grandma, a delightfully stubborn Chinese woman who always remembers my love of lychee, made sure to get me a bag from the Kapi’olani Community College farmer’s market. One morning, while eating the lychee, I read an article about a lychee farm robbery on the Big Island. Two Samoan guys were caught on the surveillance camera and were now on the lam. At first, I laughed – how lychee intoxicates everybody on this island! – but as I looked at the faces of the lychee thieves, a sadness descended upon me. What drove these guys to commit theft? What was going to happen to them if they were caught? And was this all just for some fruit that they could offload for several bucks a pound?
These questions wouldn’t go away, so I began to write “Lychee Thieves,” and wound up spending the next year-and-a-half making it into the film you’re hopefully going to see. I went home for long stretches of time (I live on the mainland) to explore why people go nuts around this little innocuous fruit. As the story crystallized, lychee came to symbolize the deliciousness in life that each and every one of us has a right to. It represented the divinity of nature and its infinite bounty. It also stood for Hawai’i. In the story, when Keoki, Arnie, Ethel and Mrs. Chun squabble over the tree, we are witnessing the territorial conflict that has afflicted the Hawaiian islands since the arrival of Captain Cook, the subsequent rise of American authority and the arrival of immigrant populations to work the plantations. Like the pristine lychee tree, the islands of Hawai’i are precious gems in the Pacific, and so they have been fought over, plundered and abused. In “Lychee Thieves,” I created an ensemble cast that represented the diversity of the island population. The Hawaiian character, Keoki, emerged as the hero, because he has an ancestral connection to the land that is awoken during the course of the film.
The experience of making “Lychee Thieves” was a very personal one for me. It afforded me the opportunity to explore my own biracial background and my relationship to Hawai’i. I think I confronted some of those questions about the Big Island lychee thieves while painting a realistic portrait of middle class Hawai’i from my firsthand experiences growing up on O’ahu. I was determined to end the film on a positive note; I am at a point in my life where I am compelled to be both realistic and optimistic. I hope audiences feel they have watched something truthful, and that they take away a promising message for the future.
-- Kathleen Man Gyllenhaal
