Projections #4: Spotlight on Sky Hopinka

Our Projections program on 31 October 2020 at the Art Gallery of New South Wales presented the Australian premiere of maɬni – towards the ocean, towards the shore (2020) by acclaimed Ho-Chunk/Pechanga filmmaker Sky Hopinka.

Sky Hopinka’s debut feature follows Sweetwater and Jordan from the Pacific Northwest, whose Chinook identities shape their views on life, death and rebirth. Spoken mostly in the nearly extinct chinuk wawa tongue, maɬni offers a moving portrait of contemporary First Nations lives in the US. 

‘The searching, striking digital films of Sky Hopinka are complex formal arrangements … but they are also wellsprings of beauty and mystery, filled with surprising confluences of speech and song, colour and motion’ – Dennis Lim, Artforum.