POV Award: Sky Hopinka + “maɬni – towards the ocean, towards the shore”
Description
maɬni – towards the ocean, towards the shore
Bodies of water ebb and flow throughout this poetic experimental documentary by filmmaker Sky Hopinka. Honoring connections to nature and the cycles of life, maɬni (pronounced moth-nee) separately follows the wanderings of Sweetwater Sahme and Jordan Mercieras as they share their personal rituals and relationships to life, identity, language, and their homeland. Meditative and beautifully photographed, the film sonically weaves in the origin-of-death myth from the Chinookan people. Hopinka has crafted a lush exploration of afterlife, rebirth, and the place in-between.—Festival 2020
Persistence of Vision Award
Memory is a slippery thing, frequently altered by experiences, exposure, and time. How can memories, so susceptible to alteration, preserve culture, combat erasure, and carry forward heritage? And if memories can be collected, how can a recollection be conveyed in a film or a photograph? Critically acclaimed, multi-hyphenate artist Sky Hopinka’s work is an ever-evolving, multifaceted exploration of the process of remembrance as one moves through time and landscape. His propulsive, non-traditional films burst with kinetic visuals, each a layered art piece that challenges the positioning of Indigenous culture in American society. A bold visionary who defies categorization, Sky Hopinka is the 2025 Festival Persistence of Vision Awardee. In celebration of his artistry SFFILM will screen his debut feature maɬni – towards the ocean, towards the shore (originally slated for the cancelled Festival 2020) as well as a special presentation of select shorts films in conjunction with BAMPFA’s installation of Hopinka’s Sunflower Siege Engine.—Jessie Fairbanks
Biographies
Ferndale, WA, native Sky Hopinka is a Ho-Chunk Nation national and descendant of the Pechanga band of Luiseño Native Americans. He is a video artist, photographer, writer, and teacher, in addition to being a filmmaker. His films include Trade (2013), Jáaji Approx. (Festival 2016), Visions of an Island (2016), Dislocation Blues (2017), Lore (2019), Kicking the Clouds (2022), and Sunflower Siege Engine (2023). maɬni – towards the ocean, towards the shore is his first feature. He is the recipient of a 2022 MacArthur Fellowship.
Beth Piatote is a Nez Perce scholar, playwright, and creative writer, and associate professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Her books include the scholarly monograph, Domestic Subjects: Gender, Citizenship, and Law in Native American Literature (Yale, 2013); and The Beadworkers: Stories (Counterpoint, 2019), which was long-listed for the PEN/Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction and the Aspen Words Literary Prize. Her poems, scholarly essays, and short stories have appeared in multiple journals and anthologies, including American Quarterly, Kenyon Review, POETRY, World Literature Today, PMLA, and elsewhere. She is the Director of the Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley.