Transcendent meditations on language, landscape, and myth, the ethnopoetic works of Sky Hopinka—a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation and descendent of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians—explode the traditions of ethnographic filmmaking and reclaim the form as a vehicle for ecstatic personal expression. Through an intricate layering of words and images, Hopinka creates dense, hallucinatory audiovisual collages that reflect his longstanding interest in endangered Indigenous languages (particularly the nearly extinct chinuk wawa) and the cultural memories embedded within them. Through both his filmmaking and his work with the COUSIN Collective, which supports fellow Native filmmakers, Hopinka has emerged as a vital force in bringing the contemporary Indigenous experience to the screen.
This interview with filmmaker Sky Hopinka was recorded in 2020.
Directed by Sky Hopinka • 2014 • United States
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.
Directed by Sky Hopinka • 2014 • United States
What begins as a documentary featuring speakers of chinuk wawa, an Indigenous language from the Pacific Northwest, becomes increasingly tangled as language patterns commingle and ideas of history and cultural identity are transmuted.
Directed by Sky Hopinka • 2015 • United States
Sky Hopinka combines audio recordings of his father with increasingly abstract video images of the landscapes they separately traversed. “Jáaji” is a near translation for directly addressing a father in the Hočak language.
Directed by Sky Hopinka • 2015 • United States
A group of students and teachers gather in a historic mansion in the West Virginia woods for a weeklong retreat in spoken Latin.
Directed by Sky Hopinka • 2016 • United States
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...
Directed by Sky Hopinka • 2016 • United States
An elegy for Native poet Diane Burns and a transcendent vision of the forms the spirit takes while descending upon landscapes of life and death.
Directed by Sky Hopinka • 2017 • United States
Reflections from Standing Rock: Cleo Keahna recounts his experiences entering, being at, and leaving the camp and the difficulties of looking back with a clear and critical eye. Terry Running Wild describes what his camp is like and what he hopes it...
Directed by Sky Hopinka • 2017 • United States
Taking its title from the texts of architect Kengo Kuma, this experimental video work suggests a way of looking at everything as “interconnected and intertwined.” Images and representations of two structures in the Portland metropolitan area that ha...
Directed by Sky Hopinka • 2018 • United States
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.
Directed by Sky Hopinka • 2018 • United States
Drawing from Bob Dylan’s song “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” this video work by Sky Hopinka overlays layers of experiences circling loss and longing with images of landscapes and movement. In the song, a stranger’s listlessness and exhaustion are wo...
Directed by Sky Hopinka • 2019 • United States
Images of landscapes and the filmmaker’s friends are cut, fragmented, and reassembled on an overhead projector as hands guide their construction and a voice tells a story about a not-too-distant past in this diaphanous pastiche of rumination, reprod...
