Zoom conversation between director Sky Hopinka and Mariana Sánchez Bueno. about Sky's feature debut, małni – towards the ocean, towards the shore.
A poetic, experimental debut feature circling the origin of the death myth from the Chinookan people in the Pacific Northwest, małni – towards the ocean, towards the shore follows two people as they wander through their surrounding nature, the spirit world, and something much deeper inside. At its center are Sweetwater Sahme and Jordan Mercier, who take separate paths contemplating their afterlife, rebirth, and death. Probing questions about humanity’s place on earth and other worlds, Sky Hopkina’s film will have audiences thinking (and dreaming) about it long after.
Please note this panel was rescheduled from April 17th due to unforeseen circumstances. If you previously registered for the April 17th date, please complete the registration for the new April 25th date in order to join the panel.
Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) was born and raised in Ferndale, Washington and spent a number of years in Palm Springs and Riverside, California, Portland, Oregon, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In Portland he studied and taught chinuk wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin. His video, photo, and text work centers around personal positions of Indigenous homeland and landscape, designs of language as containers of culture expressed through personal, documentary, and non fiction forms of media.
Mariana Sánchez Bueno is a filmmaker and film programmer from Bogotá, Colombia. She is interested in collaborative ways of making films and in creating communal platforms for conversation around arts and politics. She is co-founder of corrient.es, an online site for Latin American moving image, and co-curator of Ellipsis, a film series looking to connect film across aesthetic languages.
