Leprosy, Damien and Kalaupapa
Heroic tale filmed on location on Molokai
by Robert Gilman (gilmfilm@t-link.com)
production photos: Glenn Beadles

“Every Century.
Somewhere on Earth.
A few people embody the highest ideals of Humankind....
unconditiional love and compassion.
on Molokai...
in the 1800’s...
that person was Father Damien.”

Leprosy (Hansen’s Disease) was a swift, gruesome and alarmingly pandemic death sentence before MDTmultiple drug therapya c*cktail mix of the relatively recently introduced (1947) drugs dapsone, rifampicine (Rimactane®) and clofazimine (Lamprene®) finally braked the doom. So when the 33 year old essentially novice Belgian priest Damien was about to journey to Molokai’s roiling Kalaupapa leper colony one hundred and twenty-seven years agoseventy-five years before the MDT’s adventhis protector, Bishop Maigret warned him against touching anyone for fear of contagion. Damien reasoned he had to make contact. He did and died, disease sticken.

On Wednesday, September 22 (7:30pm) at Maui Arts & Cultural Center’s giant screened Castle Theater, The Maui Film Festival will premiere the bio-film, MolokaiThe Story of Father Damien, a culmination of a three and a half continent joint effort, involving American born, England based Academy Award winning (Gandhi) screenwriter/associate producer John Briley, the adventuresome producers Tharsi Vanhuysse and Grietje Lammertyn of Belgium’s Era Films, insightful Dutch-Australian director Paul Cox, visually subtle and exciting Italian-Australian cinematographer Nino Martinetti and the compelling Australian sound-man James Currie in addition to a crack, highly trained Hawaiian support team of crew, catering and construction personnel. The cosmopolitan company’s composition: 40% Belgian, 20% Austalian, 40% Hawaiian.

South Maui based Production Manager Jeanine Thomason began to organize the shoot in June of 1997, securing permission from three disparate entities: the Kalaupapa Patients’ Council; the State Department of Health; and, to her surprise as she discovered arriving on site, the US Park Service, overseers of the area’s natural resources and archeology. Permits acquired, she next had to resource production essentials: arrangements for the transportation to Kalaupapawhere barges could dock only in the most clement weather and the airstrip was tinyof construction supplies sufficient to authentically reconstruct a rudimentary 19th century seaside community and the concurrent renovation of existing dwellings and the building of new housing for cast and crew; and the import of mandatory equipment (Moviecam and Arriflex cameras, sound recording gear, Kodak film stock, lighting, generators, dollies, a massive Panther crane, etc.). Several refrigerators were needed. And, vehicles to transport people and supplies. Most importantly: provisions of non-perishable food; a container-load barged in earlyperishables flown in daily. Arrangements were made, upon striking the set, to leave vehicles and construction supplies behind for the patients and agencies.

As the film company arrived on Kalaupapa to prepare for the early June through mid-August 1998 shoot, Ms. Thomason received inestimable support from a capable Maui contingent: Roger Thompson, the gaffer; Bernard Weber and his Maui Catering Company; Paul Green whose carpentry was essential in creating housing for the cast and crew quartered below on the isolated peninsula. Also, Hana’s Kris Kistofferson was to portray non-resident manager Rudolph Mayer, one of Damien’s few confidants and allies. Featured players, production executives and senior crew flew puddle-jumpers topside daily; they lodged at a resort hotel boasting the (essential) restaurants and bars. Father Damien, Australian actor David Wenham, elected to stay below, though, remaining with the patients and in character for the length of the production. Wenham, who’d appeared in films such as The Boys and Dark City, but was not well-known, was selected for his “non-household-name” status to allow for the transparency and identification a relatively unknown actor would bring to the starring role.

The film, adapted from Belgian novelist Hilde Eynikel’s “Damiaan, de definiitieve biografie”, spotlights the political and religious machinations embroiling the last years of The Kingdom of Hawai’i, the subsequent Overthrow and Annexation, ensnaring the unsophisticated young priest. Born in January 1840 in Tremolo, Belgium, Josef Devuester, the future Damien, was the seventh child of middle class parents, most of whose children chose a religious life. Taking orders in Paris in 1861, young Josef inclined towards Liberal Catholicism, a then revolutionary philosophy of church-state separation. He sailed for Hawaii before his consecration which took place in Honolulu under Bishop Maigret, here played with intended irony by veteran British actor Leo McKern (The Omen, Ryan’s Daughter, The Blue Lagoon).

On the set of “Father Damien”

Damien lost the majority of his first congregation on the Big Island when Kilauea erupted in 1868. Enormously depressed, he began treating the sick and there first came into contact with those afflicted with leprosy.

Alarmed at the epidemic spread of the disease, the Kingdom of Hawai’i had established a strict quarantine situated on northern Molokai’s cliff- and sea-isolated Kalaupapa peninsula, to which it banished the infected who had been rounded up and herded. Transported by ship through choppy seas, the afflicted were cast overboard, forced to swim ashore to the bare and primitive settlement. They were supplied little food, clothing, or additional supplies. They were not meant or expected to live.

At the 1872 consecration of Wailuku’s St. Anthony’s Cathedral, Bishop Maigret asked for priests willing to minister to the colony’s lepers. Damien volunteered for a provisional three months. Arriving on Kalaupapa, he was introduced and indoctrinated by an infected English male nurse, William Williamson (the protean Peter O’Toole) who explicitly warned the priest of the extreme risk of contagion.

But Damien found that remaining apart from the lepers meant he would neither be trusted nor accepted. On Damien’s subsequent return from Honolulu, after having received from his bishop the necessary permission to mingle with the population chancing infection, Damien greeted the patients: “We, the lepers...” The die had been thrown!

The diocese had an agenda in aiding the segregated colony: eradication of the Hansen’s Disease, Gomorrah’s forced (child) prostitution and labor, thievery, bullying, sex orgies, pedophilia, opium smoking, and drunkenness; licentiousness, in general. However Damien was more humanely impelled to establish orphanages to protect the viciously abused children, to arrange for competent nursing and to attempt to alleviate the patients’ monotony and boredom. He suggested establishing bars to eliminate moonshining and requested compassionate priests to help mitigate the patient’ deplorable living conditions.

The Kingdom, though, continued enforcing its draconian policy of exclusion and containment, curtailing any contact with the explosively contagious colony. Damien himself was isolated, forced to take confession from a Boston Whaler, pitching in the harbor. Eventually, through intercessions and pleading, Damian was allowed to travel to Honolulu for the required confession or, alternatively, have a priest come to him.

Chris Haywood (Shine, Oscar and Lucinda) appears in the film as Clayton Strawn, a sleepermongering, slavetrading Scots leper who organized sex orgies, raping and pillaging the community, opposing Damien’s reforms; eventually he is converted by Damien and this transformation illuminates Damien’s positive power.

Among Damien’s few allies was the queen’s younger sister, Princess Liliokalani (Australian vocalist Kate Ceberano) who visited the forbidden peninsula, aiding the excommunicated, extending her benificence in royal patronage. When in 1883 Damien was diagnosed Hansen’s positive, he got word to the princess who convinced her sister Queen Kalakaua to import nursing nuns for the stricken lepers. Radiant Alice Krige (Star Trek: First Contact) appears as the Syracuse, New York Franciscan nun, Mother Marianne whose group is prevented by machiavellian Prime Minister Gibson (The Horse Whisperer, The Piano, Sirens’ Sam Neill)acting in concert with the diocesefrom travelling to Molokai to attend to the colony’s needs. Damien himself was segregated in 1886, still without a nurse.

Although deperately ill, the heroic priest continued his battle for the patients’ betterment in the face of official indifference and avoidance. Although officially banned, he triumphantly infiltrated Honolulu where he was visited by the royal family and pled for his communicants. A religious visitor, Brother Joseph Ira Dutton interceded with English Anglicans who contributed substantial sums to the settlementcash coveted by the Hawaiian Church and Government, but applied by Damien as intended, for the diseased.

The valiant priest had become a symbol for 19th century humanitarianism, drawing admirers and aid from around the globe, while continuously opposed by official policies. As his disease worsened, the nursing Sisters were finally given permission to enter the colony. Surrounded by those he had aided and loved and by those who adored him, Damien died in April 1889, having transformed his world in a short 17 years.

* MAUI TIME * September 14, 1999 *