Movies: Sky Hopinka

In late 2021, Cleveland’s baseball team was reborn as the Guardians. This documentary, directed by Lance Edmands, chronicles the saga of that name change, which has its roots in a forgotten legend named Louis Sockalexis, and the tragedy that envelope...

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 projec...

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....

An experimental look at the origin of the death myth of the Chinookan people in the Pacific Northwest, following two people as they navigate their own relationships to the spirit world and a place in between life and death....

Powwow People is a portrait of a powwow and its participants....

This film is an homage to the Gaza Strip and to the possibility of hope beyond hopelessness. Ouroboros, the symbol of the snake eating its tail, is both end and beginning: death as regeneration. A 74-minute experimental narrative film that turns the ...

In this video drawing from Bob Dylan's song "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues," layers of experiences circling loss and longing are overlaid between images of landscapes and movement. In the song, a stranger's listlessness and exhaustion are woven through...

Against landscapes that the artist and his father traversed, audio of the father in the Ho-Chunk language is transcribed using the International Phonetic Alphabet, which tapers off, narrowing the distance between recorder and recordings, new and trad...

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....

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....

This film is based on the tale of the four water spirits known as Island Weights. In the creation story of Ho-Chunk, the artist’s home nation, the spirits are placed at the Earth’s cardinal points, ensuring that its rotation is not chaotic. Ho-Chunk,...

A deal between two men threatens to unravel as tensions rise in this contemporary look at Indigenous language and culture....

The last piece in the constellation of works including Kicking the Clouds, Mnemonics of Shape and Reason, and the text Hello Trouble as well as a series of etched photographs. A letter to a sibling, reflecting on our pasts and ourselves, and the par...

The title of this video, taken from the texts of the architect Kengo Kuma, suggests a way of looking at everything as “interconnected and intertwined” - such as the historical and the present and the tool and the artifact. Images and representations ...

In Electric Snakes, Adrian C. Louis’s thirteenth poetry collection, no one is spared his critical eye, including himself. These powerful and often humorous poems cover myriad subjects: Trump, music, zombies, Jimmy John’s, childhood, caller ID, veneti...

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 em...

Featuring speakers of Chinuk Wawa, an Indigenous language from the Pacific Northwest, WAWA begins slowly, patterning various forms of documentary and ethnography. Quickly, the patterns tangle and become confused and commingled, while translating and ...

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 terrai...

An exploration of Fort Marion, the US fort where Native American prisoners of war were placed....

A group of students and teachers gather in an historical mansion in the woods of West Virginia for a week-long retreat in spoken Latin. I observe and I participate while navigating the errata with my camera....