Jacob “Jake” Aija Aini Hawkes not only stars in Iakwe: Hello, Goodbye, the film reflects his own experience.

“I would say like maybe 80 to 90 percent of it is pretty accurate to the real-life story,” Hawkes says of the short film directed by Nathan Fitch, which just made its world premiere at the Bentonville Film Festival in Northwest Arkansas.

Hawkes was born in the Republic of the Marshall Islands and adopted as a baby by an American family who raised him in Utah, thousands of miles from the coral atolls of his birthplace. As an adult, he went to work for a company that sent him to Arkansas selling door-to-door. Entirely by chance, Hawkes ended up knocking on the door of a Marshallese family in Arkansas. He would discover to his astonishment that he had randomly come to the home of his aunt – his birth mother’s sister – all that way from the Marshall Islands.

In the film, the scenario has him trying to interest residents in home security systems.

“Nathan was great directing. He’s like, ‘Do you need a moment to kind of go back into that situation [you were] in?’” Hawkes recalls. “He helped me just take the time to kind of relive that experience and it’s tough to try to go back to those emotional experiences and reenact them, but he did great helping me stay comfortable and calm. But it was very emotional.”

The film’s story is credited to Hawkes, with Fitch and Russell Leigh Sharman credited as screenwriters. Iakwe: Hello, Goodbye begins with a gung-ho manager exhorting his team to rack up sales and taking “Jake” (the character Hawkes plays) aside to urge him to cut his lengthy hair. The manager appears completely unaware this might amount to cultural erasure. That moment, too, came from Hawkes’ own experience.

“I was knocking doors for a solar company in DC and my sales manager actually said that same thing,” Hawkes remembers. “He’s like, ‘Hey, you should get a haircut, chop the top, like the long hair. You’ll make more sales, I promise.’ So that kind of affected me and I thought it’d be interesting to throw that in [the film].”

There are other personal touches in Iakwe: Hello, Goodbye, like actual home videos of Hawkes’s childhood in Utah, and a recorded message from the actor’s late adoptive father.

“Nathan was so kind to incorporate my adopted father’s voicemail that he left me before he passed,” Hawkes tells us. “I was very, very emotional and I was grateful for that to make it in the film too.”

Fitch, who is based in New York, has spent a lot of time in Arkansas – shooting Iakwe there as well as his previous film, the documentary In Exile. That 2023 nonfiction short explored the experience of Marshallese who ended up settling in Arkansas – not by choice, but because the U.S. government’s nuclear testing program in the Marshall Islands rendered much of the area uninhabitable.

That Arkansas has become a home – or more accurately a home away from home – for many from the Marshall Islands is an unusual story itself. It has to do with a Marshallese man named John Moody, who studied at an Oklahoma college and then moved to Northwest Arkansas in the early 1980s.

“[He] started working in a Tyson Foods factory and then it became the story of chain migration,” Fitch explains. “Because of a combination of the nuclear testing and the islands being made unlivable and then climate change and the economy not booming, Arkansas just became the place that everyone moved to.”

Today, “More than 15,000 Marshallese live in northwest Arkansas and in nearby communities in Oklahoma, Kansas, and Missouri,” according to MEI.ngo. “Springdale [AR] boasts the largest population… with more than 12,000.”

Fitch is expanding his short In Exile into a feature-length documentary. He’s about to head to the Marshall Islands to cover some recent developments in the story.

“The Marshallese have been getting swept up in ICE deportations. So that’s become a part of the film, sort of tracking that from both sides,” the director says. “Like this family that had spent 15 or 20 years trying to build the American dream here, the father gets deported back to Ebeye, which is one of the most densely populated islands in the Pacific and everyone works on Kwajalein, which is a U.S. military base, but he can’t work there because he’s been deported and so it’s like an impossible situation. So that’s going to be part of the feature.”

Iakwe producer Lailanie Gadia first became aware of Fitch through his 2017 feature documentary Island Soldiers, “the untold story of Micronesian citizens fighting America’s wars.”

“I grew up in Guam and so wanting to tell more Pacific Islander stories and Nathan and I have just been keeping in touch over the years,” Gadia says, noting that Iakwe: Hello, Goodbye presented their first chance to work together. “I was also blown away by the story and just knowing that there’s a huge Marshallese community in Arkansas and wanting to support the community and Nathan wanting to build capacity within the Marshallese community was very interesting to me. No other filmmakers have done that, and I thought that was a really great way for more Marshallese to tell their story as well.”

Fitch offered six Springdale High School students a paid opportunity to work on the film, most of them of Marshallese descent. “The kids were really involved,” he notes. “I mean, they read the script last May, before we shot.”

The film is inspiring for the students and others from the Marshallese diaspora.

“There aren’t that many narrative films featuring Marshallese actors. There was a film called The Land of Eb that was at Toronto maybe like 10 years ago that was made in Hawaii,” Fitch says. “But I just feel like for the community to see one of their own, Jake, a good actor, charismatic, good-looking guy who gets to be the star, I feel like that kind of tells the younger people that they can also do that. The Marshallese can be actors and stars and not just victims of nuclear testing.”

Hawkes, who is also a music producer, sees more acting in his future.

“This was my first gig… I definitely want to give it another shot,” he affirms. “I’m open to opportunities to act more. I think it’d be really fun, especially after this experience. It gave me the kind of motivation to be more creative outside of just music and so I think it’d be really fun.”