Short Films from Sky Hopinka

ABOUT THE FILMS: “Kunįkaga Remember Red Banks, Kunįkaga Remembers the Welcoming Song,” 2014, Dir. Sky Hopinka, 9 Mins, USA The video traverses the history and the memory of a place shared by both the Ho-Chunk and settler: Red Banks, a Ho-Chunk village site near present day Green Bay, WI was also the site of Jean Nicolet’s landing, who in 1634 was the first European in what is now called Wisconsin. Images and text are used to explore this space alongside my grandmother’s recollections. Each serve as representations of personal and shared history, as well as of practices and processes of remembrance. FORMAT: DCP “Fainting Spells,” 2018, Dir. Sky Hopinka, 11 Mins, USA 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. FORMAT: DCP “Kicking the Clouds,” 2021, Dir. Sky Hopinka, 16 Mins, USA This film is a reflection on descendants and ancestors, guided by a 50-year-old audio recording of my grandmother learning the Pechanga language from her mother. After being given this tape by my mother, I interviewed her and asked about it, and recorded her ruminations on their lives and her own. The footage is of our chosen home in Whatcom County, Washington, where my family still lives, far from our homelands in Southern California, yet a home nonetheless. FORMAT: DCP “Dislocation Blues,” 2017, Dir. Sky Hopinka, 17 Mins, USA An incomplete and imperfect portrait of reflections from Standing Rock. Shaawan Francis Keahna recounts his experiences entering, being at and leaving the camp and the difficulties and the reluctance in looking back with a clear and critical eye. Terry Running Wild describes what his camp is like, and what he hopes it will become. FORMAT: DCP “When you’re lost in the rain,” 2018, Dir. Sky Hopinka, 5 Mins, USA 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 by Dylan, a stranger’s listlessness and exhaustion are woven through and around Juarez, Mexico, and so too in this video are these stories woven around colonial discontent and uncertainty as they move through an uneasy negotiation with the strangeness of the American pioneer spirit. FORMAT: DCP “Jáaji Approx,” 2015, Dir. Sky Hopinka, 8 Mins, USA Logging and approximating a relationship between audio recordings of my father and videos gathered of the landscapes we have both separately traversed. The initial distance between the logger and the recordings, of recollections and of songs, new and traditional, narrows while the images become an expanding semblance of filial affect. Jáaji is a near translation for directly addressing a father in the Hočak language. FORMAT: DCP “Anti-Objects, or Space Without Path or Boundary,” 2017, Dir. Sky Hopinka, 13 Mins, USA “The individual is not an autonomous, solitary object but a thing of uncertain extent, with ambiguous boundaries. So too is matter, which loses much of its allure the moment it is reduced to an object, shorn of its viscosity, pressure and density. Both subject and matter resist their reduction into objects. Everything is interconnected and intertwined.” -Kengo Kuma 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 of two structures in the Portland Metropolitan Area that have direct and complicated connections to the Chinookan people who inhabit(ed) the land are woven with audio tapes of one of the last speakers of chinuk wawa, the Chinookan creole, chinuk wawa. These localities of matter resist their reduction into objects, and call anew for space and time given to wandering as a deliberate act, and the empowerment of shared utility. FORMAT: DCP “Lore,” 2019, Dir. Sky Hopinka, 10 Mins, USA Images of friends and landscapes are cut, fragmented and reassembled on an overhead projector as hands guide their shape and construction in this film stemming from Hollis Frampton’s “Nostalgia.” The voice tells a story about a not too distant past, a not too distant ruin, with traces of nostalgia articulated in terms of lore; knowledge and memory passed down and shared not from wistful loss, but as a pastiche of rumination, reproduction and creation. FORMAT: DCP “I’ll Remember You as You Were, not as What You’ll Become,” 2016, Dir. Sky Hopinka, 12 Mins, USA An elegy to Diane Burns on the shapes of mortality and being, and the forms the transcendent spirit takes while descending upon landscapes of life and death. A place for new mythologies to syncopate with deterritorialized movement and song, reifying old routes of reincarnation. Where resignation gives hope for another opportunity, another form, for a return to the vicissitudes of the living and all their refractions. FORMAT: DCP