File photo
Queen Lydia Kamakaeha Lili‘uokalani,
the last ruling monarch of the Kingdom of Hawaii.
"I get really excited about things that interest me," Ducat says unnecessarily about "Hawaii's Last Queen," which airs tonight on PBS.
The hourlong documentary tells the story of Queen Lili'uokalani's life, her embattled reign as queen of Hawaii, and the ultimate betrayal that led to the loss of her kingdom.
Trained as a director at the BBC in London, Ducat knows documentary making. She's written, directed and produced documentaries for more than a decade on a range of subjects from the spread of the English language to the social history of railroads.
It was while she was in Hawaii in 1990 doing a film for a BBC series called "Nippon" - about post-war Japan, Hawaii's Japanese-Americans and Japanese tourism - that she began to see Hawaii as more than a tourist destination.
"As naive as this sounds, I discovered that Hawaii was a far more interesting place than I had ever imagined," said Ducat from her New York home. "When I returned to New York City I read a comprehensive Hawaii history and was stunned to learn that Hawaii had once been a kingdom with a British-style monarchy.
"Nobody knows these things on the mainland," she said. "No one knows about Queen Lili'uokalani or the sovereignty movement."
In 1991 Ducat proposed to "The American Experience" a film about the overthrow because of the timeliness of the 1993 centennial. They declined but three years later contacted Ducat and said the documentary was a go "if" it focused on Queen Lili'uokalani with the overthrow mixed into her story.
The yearlong project was completed last May after Ducat had made two trips to Hawaii, including one that kept her here two-and-a-half months researching and filming. But the writer-producer wasn't met with a lot of aloha by some members in the local film community.
"People had their backs up. I was an outsider getting national funds to make a film about their story," she said. "I had to gain their trust and I did that by doing my homework."
Ducat uses historical and current photographs and footage of key places and interviews with Lili'uokalani historians to follow the queen's life from her birth in 1838 to her death in 1917.
On Jan. 16, 1893, four boatloads of United States Marines armed with Gatling guns and hundreds of rounds of ammunition came ashore in Honolulu, the capital of the Kingdom of Hawaii. About 162 troops marched through the streets to the palace. The queen looked down from her balcony as the troops took up their positions below in the evening light.
The next day she surrendered to the U.S. government at gunpoint. A provisional government led by wealthy European-American sugar growers assumed control of Hawaii and petitioned the United States for annexation.
"Lili'uokalani was born into a culture under siege," Ducat said. "Epidemics and alcoholism had already killed off 80 percent of the native population in the 50 years before her birth.
"Christian missionaries had converted a third of the remaining population and were tremendously influential in educating the children of the Hawaiian ruling class."
Ducat, who says her film is not political, calls Lili'uokalani one of the most important figures in U.S. history. "How many other women were in a position of power and leadership in the 19th century? Lili'uokalani was a real intellectual of her time and well traveled, a guest at the White House several times and Buckingham Palace.
"She was a poet and composer, writing more than 165 songs including 'Aloha Oe' and was fiercely proud of her Hawaiian heritage when that interest was being watered down and some people were losing respect for it."
Thelma Bugbee, a part-Hawaiian kupuna, in the film says, "If you can imagine something within your own culture that is tremendously important to you, that is suddenly done away with - just totally ripped out and gone - that's what we went through.
"If the missionaries were like Jesus Christ, it would have worked beautifully, but they were not; they were human beings."
What: "The American Experience: Hawaii's Last Queen"