(46 min TRT)

A homesick tribute to the fertile swamps, swaying palm fronds, and fond descriptions of the filmmaker’s Florida home, this film is alive with evocative language of the land’s humid spirit.

(Ariana Simpson, US, 2023, 4 min, in English with hardcoded English text and Braille)

2024 Cadence Artist-in-Residence!

An abstract exploration of the multifaceted relationships between the African diaspora, Islam, and selfhood. The film interprets the Adhan, the Islamic public call to prayer, as a religious tool of testament, spiritual bridge between existences, and an apparatus to deepen one’s connection with the divine and self.

(Kamyar Mohsenin, US, 2023, 5 min, in Arabic)

Fairies delves into the intricate relationship between queerness, melancholy, and utopianism. Encapsulating traces of rural village life, hardship, and the tender embrace of home, this film serves as a poetic translation of stepping out of the binary that holds queer possibilities at a standstill and embracing oneself in this transitional zone.

(Thijs Hendrik Jan Fisser, Netherlands, 2023, 11 min, in English with hardcoded English text)

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the heart farm explores ties to landscape, family, and self, highlighting the tenderness in the uncertainty of the human experience. Drawing on Appalachian heritage, the piece aims to convey the nuances of such a liminal space.

(Livia Glascock, US, 2023, 5 min, nonverbal with hardcoded handwritten English text)

2024 Cadence Artist-in-Residence!

A photographic interpretation of Irma Pineda’s poem “Cue’ Yoo / La pared (The Wall)” that emphasizes how emotion etches itself on our memories, creating narratives that seep beyond expected boundaries of time and space. Translated to English by Wendy Call.

(director: Harvey Castro, poet: Irma Pineda, translator: Wendy Call, Mexico, 2022, 3 min, in Zapotec, Spanish & English with hardcoded English subtitles)

A collaborative experimental documentary in which the camera, as an attentive observer, shows its own memories and associations related to the multimedia art installation Safe & Sound by Mahoor Mirshakkak, creating a sensual and visual connection between artifacts in the exhibition and the artist’s memories and lived moments outside of the exhibition. The film follows the process of preparation, presentation, and dismantling of the exhibition while seeking its visual and sensual origins in the real world.

(Mahshid Afzali & Mahoor Mirshakkak, Iran, 2024, 20 min, in English with hardcoded English subtitles)

Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians, born 1984, Ferndale, Washington) layers imagery and poetic prose to create art that foregrounds relationships between communities, landscape, and language. His work intermingles English and Indigenous dialects such as Chinuk Wawa, a revived Chinookan creole of the Pacific Northwest, to consider how language shapes perception of place and acts as a container of culture. This presentation—the artist’s first solo museum exhibition in the Northwest—features four recent films and new photographs that focus on personal and political notions of Indigenous homeland.

Growing up in Washington State, far from his ancestral tribal lands in the Midwest and Southwest regions, Hopinka traveled the western powwow circuit with his parents. These foundational experiences of itinerancy and, as the artist describes, making a “home nonetheless,” continue to influence his artistic practice. The films in Subterranean Ceremonies revolve around transit and life on the road, a liminal zone the artist embraces as a space of community and knowledge production. Mnemonics of Shape and Reason (2021), for example, layers disjointed, often hypersaturated landscapes to ruminate on relationships of memory and place, while The Island Weights (2021) narrates a journey along the boundaries of Ho-Chunk homelands in search of four water spirits from the tribe’s creation story.

The photographs in the exhibition glimpse disparate locations linked through the artist’s travels and include etched phrases drawn from stories, songs, and his own poetry. Guided by an impulse to wander, Hopinka’s artmaking defies ethnographic conventions and privileges Indigenous-centered approaches to storytelling.

Image credit: Sky Hopinka. In Dreams and Autumn (still), 2021. Three-channel video (color, sound); 11:04 min. Courtesy of the artist

Founded in 1952, the Frye is Seattle’s only free art museum, bringing together art and new ideas within a stunning Olson Sundberg Kundig-designed building in historic First Hill. A founding collection of turn-of-the-century oil paintings is bolstered by a wide range of modern and contemporary art holdings, reflecting our region’s evolving identity and a commitment to exploring the art of our time. Learn more at fryemuseum.org.

⚠️ Please note: NWFF patrons will be required to wear masks that cover both nose and mouth while in the building. We are not currently checking vaccination cards.

Cadence Video Poetry Festival, presented by Northwest Film Forum and programmed in collaboration with Seattle author Chelsea Werner-Jatzke and intermedia artist Rana San, is a series of screenings, workshops, and discussions on the genre of video poetry, during National Poetry Month.

Cadence approaches video poetry as a literary genre presented as visual media that makes new meaning from the combination of text and moving image. Featuring screenings, an artist residency, generative workshops for youth and adults, and juried awards, the festival fosters critical and creative growth around the medium of video poetry.