Sky Hopinka will be in-attendance for a post-film Q&A!

(Sky Hopinka, 2016-2022, United States, 83 min, in English)

The Seattle Film Critics Society and Northwest Film Forum are excited to present an evening of films by Sky Hopinka, recipient of SFCS’s 2025 John Hartl Pacific Northwest Spotlight Award, presented annually to honor the outstanding work of a person with local ties to the region.

FILMS IN THIS PROGRAM: 

Mnemonics of Shape and Reason (2021, HD video, stereo, color, TRT 04:13)
“Hopinka’s video Mnemonics of Shape and Reason (2021) traverses the memory of a place and space visited by the artist. Employing an original syntax of storytelling, the artist interweaves scattered and reassembled landscapes with layers of captured audio, poetic text, and music. A rhythmic account of the spiritual implications of colonial plunder, Hopinka’s fluid reflections transmute ideas of spiritual malleability tied to land, sky, sea, myth, place, and personhood.”

Kicking the Clouds (2021 16mm to HD video, stereo, color, TRT 15:37)
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.

I’ll Remember You as You Were, Not as What You’ll Become (2016, Video, color, stereo, TRT 12:32)
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.

“I’m from Oklahoma I ain’t got no one to call my own.
If you will be my honey, I will be your sugar pie way hi ya
way ya hi ya way ya hi yo”
-Diane Burns (1957-2006)

Fainting Spells (2018 Video, color, stereo, TRT 10:45)
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.

Lore (2019 16mm to HD video, stereo, color, TRT 10:16)
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.

Dislocation Blues (2017, Video, color, stereo, TRT 16:57)
An incomplete and imperfect portrait of reflections from Standing Rock. Cleo 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.

Sunflower Siege Engine (2022, HD video, 16mm to HD video, stereo, color, TRT 12:23)
Moments of resistance are collapsed and woven together; from documentation of the Indigenous led
occupation of Alcatraz, to the reclamation of Cahokia and the repatriation of the ancestors, to one’s
reflections on their body as they exist in the world today, These are gestures that meditate on the carceral inception and nature of the reservation system, and where sovereignty and belligerence intersect and diverge.

Curated by Eric Zhu