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Sky Hopinka in conversation

audio


Published

17 September 2020

Sky Hopinka in conversation

Sky Hopinka in conversation with BFMAF programmer Herb Shellenberger about the film ‘maɬni – towards the ocean, towards the shore’.

Sky Hopinka (1984, Washington) is a filmmaker, artist, teacher and curator based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His work centres around personal positions of homeland and landscape, designs of language and facets of culture contained within, and the play between the accessibility of the known and the unknowable. He received his BA from Portland State University in Liberal Arts and his MFA in Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. In Portland he studied and taught chinuk wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin. His work has played at various festivals including ImagineNATIVE Media + Arts Festival, Images Festival, Wavelengths (Toronto), Ann Arbor Film Festival, American Indian Film Festival (San Francisco), Sundance, Antimatter (Victoria, Canada), Chicago Underground Film Festival, FLEXfest (Florida), Projections (New York), and the LA Film Festival. His work was a part of the 2016 Wisconsin Triennial and the 2017 Whitney Biennial. He was awarded jury prizes at the Milwaukee Underground Film Festival, the More with Less Award at the 2016 Images Festival, the Tom Berman Award for Most Promising Filmmaker at the 54th Ann Arbor Film Festival, and 3rd Prize at the 2015 Media City Film Festival. Sky Hopinka’s Dislocation Blues won the 2017 Berwick New Cinema Award and his film Visions of an Island was shown in an exhibition during BFMAF 2016.

Herb Shellenberger is a film programmer and writer originally from Philadelphia and based in London. He has curated screenings and film series at an international array of very excellent film festivals, cinematheques and art institutions, as well as some not so good like Tate and Tyneside Cinema which unfortunately have treated their workers very poorly. He is editor of Rep Cinema International, a newsletter/online publication focusing on repertory and archival film exhibition around the world and has recently written for the exhibition catalogue Dream Dance: The Art of Ed Emswhiller (Anthology Editions/Lightbox Film Center, 2019).