Between the dizzying hallucinatory landscapes and circular images of a lens or porthole, Hopinka takes us to a world of dreams, spirits and myths, revealing the story of Xąwįska, the Indian Pipe Plant used by the Ho-Chunk to revive those who have fainted. With abstracted and inverted images Hopinka moves from an editing station into the landscape, illuminating the sense of losing oneself, of fear and renewal. —Ruth Hodgins
Filmmaker Sky Hopinka presents a screening of his short films in conversation with Nicole Yip, Director of LUX Scotland. Based in Milwaukee, Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk/Pechanga) focuses on the interconnections between his indigenous homeland, language, landscapes, and identity. Anchored by both surreal perspectives and grounded realities, Hopinka’s sublime films create maps of dreams and memories, pushing against cultural and personal boundaries, creating meaning where none had existed before.
Hopinka will read from his debut publication Around the Edge of Encircling Lake (2018) and the screening will include:
Kunįkága Remembers Red Banks, Kunįkága Remembers the Welcome Song, 2014, US, 9 mins
Jáaji Approx, 2015, US, 15 mins
I’ll Remember You as You Were, Not as What You’ll Become, 2016, US, 12 mins
Dislocation Blues, 2017, US, 17 mins
Fainting Spells, 2018, US, 12 mins
Special thanks to Ruth Hodgins, Walker Art Center
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Translation, transformation and transition: the final 2018 Berwick New Cinema competition programme focuses on shifting perspectives, the tension between the real and the virtual, and the relationship between mental and physical landscapes.
Q&A with filmmakers Tako Taal & Callum Hill.
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Glittering and shimmering moments: the tender touch of your child; the lumbering gait of a dancer dressed in an improbable costume; the luxury of a well-earned day off work. These glances, snapshots and memories are bound together in films alternating between the mundane and fantastic.
Q&A with filmmaker Beatrice Gibson
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Shine bright. Portraits of a nomadic musician and an animatedly-perverse single father butt up against a simulacrum of the Middle East and a tactile inquiry into the natural world. Taken together, expressions of personal, political, spiritual, mystical and sexual agency provide powerful statements of either resistance to or complicity in an increasingly commodified world.
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Sensory, colourful and widescreen, the forest is already naturally cinematic.
Since the turn of this century, the forest has fascinated a new generation of global art filmmakers who have chosen the forest as a space for their creative exploration. ‘Screening the Forest’ takes nature as its point of departure by weaving together cinematic forests from India, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines. In some cases, the forest may even refer to nothing but a world construed as its own territory.
Like the real forest, where many genuses of trees coexist, the programme emphasizes that cinema is constructed not only culturally and aesthetically, but also ecologically or even animistically. As new strategies and interpretations of the forest emerge from a variety of Asian filmmakers, new trees can be sowed within our own imagination.
Q&A with curator Dr. Graiwoot Chulphongsathorn