Kicking the Clouds
An experimental documentary, Kicking the Clouds is centered on a 50-year-old cassette tape of a Pechanga language lesson between the director’s grandmother and great-grandmother, and contextualized by an interview with his mother in his Pacific Northwest hometown.
Sky Hopinka
Director
Also Directed by Sky Hopinka
The filmmaker's grandmother orates memories and the history of Red Banks, a pre-contact Hocąk village near present-day Green Bay, WI.
Texts and performances by the late Indigenous poet Diane Burns bind Sky Hopinka’s dazzling and mysterious blend of original and found sources, which continues the filmmaker’s exploration of language, storytelling, and transcendent ways of seeing.
Told through recollections of youth, learning, lore, and departure, this is an imagined myth for the Xąwįska, or the Indian Pipe Plant - used by the Ho-Chunk to revive those who have fainted.
An Unangam Tunuu elder describes cliffs and summits, drifting birds, and deserted shores. A group of students and teachers play and invent games revitalizing their language. A visitor wanders in a quixotic chronicling of earthly and supernal terrain. These visions offer glimpses of an island in the center of the Bering Sea.
Filmed during the 2016 Standing Rock protests in South Dakota, Sky Hopinka's Dislocation Blues offers a portrait of the movement and its water protectors, refuting grand narratives and myth-making in favour of individual testimonials.
Images of landscapes are cut and fragmented, as a hand guides their shape and construction. The voice tells a story about a not too distant past, and elements of nostalgia are assembled in terms of lore.
Sky Hopinka traverses the personal memories embedded within the landscape of Red Banks, a precontact Ho-Chunk village site near present-day Green Bay, Wisconsin, that was also where European settler Jean Nicolet made his landing in 1634.
A global portrait documenting the year's events, Cinetracts '20 features the work of an international lineup of 20 filmmakers. Capturing the zeitgeist in their own backyard, the artists' short films are the culmination of a year-long residency project.
For Dreaming the Dark: hands that see, eyes that touch, Ana Vaz invited artists and filmmakers whose work trust cinema’s capacity to transform relationships between the body and the camera to propose works that will engage with both perception and embodiment. Could cinema be an art of embodiment? By what rituals and actions could vision become tactile?
An exploration of Fort Marion, the US fort where Native American prisoners of war were placed.
