17 September 2020
Run Time
80 mins
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.
Maɬni – towards the ocean, towards the shore (2020), Lore (2019), Cloudless Blue Egress of Summer (2019), When you’re lost in the rain (2018), Fainting Spells (2018), Dislocation Blues (2017), Anti-Objects, or Space Without Path or Boundary (2017), I’ll Remember You as You Were, Not as What You’ll Become (2016), Visions of an Island (2016), Jáaji Approx. (2015), Venite et Loquamur (2015), Kunįkaga Remembers Red Banks, Kunįkaga Remembers the Welcome Song (2014), wawa (2014)
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
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
