East Island is a 20-minute film mixing documentary and fiction. It follow the Carlas’s character, a Puerto Rican woman in her thirties, living in New York. One day, Carla discovers a scrapbook made by one of her ancestors . In this book, he learns glimpses of her family’s past, Puerto Ricans forced into exile in Hawaii and working in the sugar cane plantations after the colonization of these nations by the United States. With this scrapbook as her only guide, Carla leaves for Hawaii. We follow her from the main islands - where she meets the inhabitants, sometimes also descendants of Puerto Rican, Japanese or Filipino slaves - to East Island. On this island of the French Frigate Shoals archipelago, she is convinced the one her ancestors left something there and she must find it, before the island is definitively swallowed up by the sea.

In Carla’s footsteps, we discover the devastating effect of climate change on the archipelago but also the culture expressions that have developed there since the colonization by the United States. These survivals, which became symbols of resistance, appear then as a vector of hope and their understanding as possible way to save these islands.