Program Description

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. This collection of short films highlights Hopinka’s vibrant approach and restless intellect as he explores the intersection of spaces and individuals, the dislocation of centuries of erasure, the allure of home, and the power of language. Each is a capsule of recollection, reconstruction, and renewal. (All short film loglines provided by Sky Hopinka.) —Jessie Fairbanks

This selection of short films is part of the 2025 SFFILM Festival’s Persistence of Vision Award screening and conversation with Sky Hopinka. Join us for the both these shorts and the award presentation. The total runtime is 86 min.

Dislocation Blues
(2017, 17 min)
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.

Fainting Spells
(2018, 11 min)
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.

Just a Soul Responding
(2023, 16 min)
This is a travelogue of sorts, as two friends whose lives intersect and diverge, look at the road and the vessels we use as means to traverse landscapes both contemporary and historical, and of the spirit and of the body. The title, inspired in part by Smokey Robinson’s Just My Soul Responding, refers to the passive and active ways that movement guides and shapes the routes one follows and creates in roadways and waterways long established, yet sympathetic to paths of desire and paths of refusal. Through each channel are various attempts to reconcile who we are, who we want to be, as well as who and what was lost along the way.

Kicking the Clouds
(2021, 16 min)
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.

Kunįkaga Remember Red Banks, Kunįkaga Remembers the Welcoming Song
(2014, 10 min)
The video traverses the history and the memory of a place shared by both the Hočąk and the settler. Red Banks, a pre-contact Hočąk 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 present day Wisconsin. Images and text are used to explore this space alongside my grandmother’s recollections. Each serves as representations of personal and shared memory, as well as representations of practices and processes of remembrance, from the Hočąk creation story, to Jean Nicolet’s landing, to the present.

Lore
(2019, 11 min)
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.

When you’re lost in the rain
(2018, 5 min)
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.

Total Runtime 86 min

Accessibility Information

Closed Captions are not currently confirmed for this program
Audio Descriptions are not currently confirmed for this program
American Sign Language Interpretation is not currently scheduled for this program