Hawaii:In Ka’u on the Big Island, what started with a handful of coffee farmers has grown into a full-blown industry that is recognized around the world. Ka’u Coffee Festival organizer Chris Manredi has been there from the beginning. “It’s really a remarkable story,” he said. That story is the focus of a new documentary called “A History of Ka’u Coffee.” The film chronicles the rise of Ka’u coffee as told through the stories of the men and women who turned to growing it out of necessity when the sugar plantations closed. “They say that necessity is the mother of invention,” Manfredi said. “When the plantation closed it’s important to understand that many of these families were generationally dependent upon the plantation and then all of sudden it was gone.” Manfredi and videographers Alla Kostenko and her husband, Ruslan Kuznetsov, produced the 20-minute film that details the farmers trials and triumphs. “When you think about their story, everything was based around the plantation. And then it was just nothing,” Kostenko said. “A lot of people had to move out and they persisted and they stayed on.” Persistence paid off. Since it burst onto the scene in 2007, Ka’u coffee has consistently ranked as one of the best brews in the world. “So now Kau has a name as a premium coffee growing region, a unique visitor destination, and the price paid to the grower has quadrupled over this period of time,” Manfredi said. The documentary shows how the area on the southern side of the Big Island is now covered with coffee farms and more are being planted. But Kostenko said there is much more to the story than what she could show on film. “It was probably ten times more material than we could have used in the film. It could have been a full-on documentary, and we wanted to include everything because every little detail was interesting. But unfortunately, it’s a short film and we had to cut a lot of that,” she said. The farmers have been able to buy their own farms, and to build equity and wealth. The filmmakers hope people who see the film appreciate the hard work growers pour into every cup of Ka’u coffee. “It’s just a lot of back breaking work that I don’t think most people know about,” Manfredi said.