Deerfoot of the Diamond Trailermaɬni—towards the ocean, towards the shore TrailerOuroboros Trailer
Sky Hopinka is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee in film, video, and new genres. He is learning his tribal heritage language, Hočak, and working on various video projects that stem from ideas of contemporary indigenous linguistic concepts, identity, and representational imagery.
Total trailers found: 27
27 September 2022
In late 2021, Cleveland’s baseball team was reborn as the Guardians. This documentary, directed by Lance Edmands, chronicles the saga of that name change, which has its roots in a forgotten legend named Louis Sockalexis, and the tragedy that enveloped his story more than a century ago.
22 January 2015
Against landscapes that the artist and his father traversed, audio of the father in the Ho-Chunk language is transcribed using the International Phonetic Alphabet, which tapers off, narrowing the distance between recorder and recordings, new and traditional, memory and song.
08 October 2020
A global portrait documenting the year's events, Cinetracts '20 features the work of an international lineup of 20 filmmakers.
15 October 2020
Images of landscapes are cut and fragmented, as a hand guides their shape and construction. The voice tells a story about a not too distant past, and elements of nostalgia are assembled in terms of lore.
10 May 2018
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.
05 January 2019
An exploration of Fort Marion, the US fort where Native American prisoners of war were placed.
01 January 2019
In Electric Snakes, Adrian C. Louis’s thirteenth poetry collection, no one is spared his critical eye, including himself.
01 January 2013
A deal between two men threatens to unravel as tensions rise in this contemporary look at Indigenous language and culture.
19 January 2023
Moments of resistance are collapsed and woven together; from documentation of the Indigenous led occupation of Alcatraz, to the reclamation of Cahokia and the repatriation of the ancestors, to one’s reflections on their body as they exist in the world today, These are gestures that meditate on the carceral inception and nature of the reservation system, and where sovereignty and belligerence intersect and diverge.
27 October 2021
“Hopinka’s video Mnemonics of Shape and Reason (2021) traverses the memory of a place and space visited by the artist.
01 January 2021
The last piece in the constellation of works including Kicking the Clouds, Mnemonics of Shape and Reason, and the text Hello Trouble as well as a series of etched photographs.
15 July 2021
This film is based on the tale of the four water spirits known as Island Weights. In the creation story of Ho-Chunk, the artist’s home nation, the spirits are placed at the Earth’s cardinal points, ensuring that its rotation is not chaotic.
26 January 2026
Trapped in museum archives, Ancestors bend time and space to find their way home. History, spirituality, and the law collide as tribal repatriation specialists fight to return and rebury Indigenous human remains, offering a revealing look at the still-pervasive worldviews that justified collecting them in the first place.
22 April 2017
The title of this video, taken from the texts of the architect Kengo Kuma, suggests a way of looking at everything as “interconnected and intertwined” - such as the historical and the present and the tool and the artifact.
15 July 2014
Featuring speakers of Chinuk Wawa, an Indigenous language from the Pacific Northwest, WAWA begins slowly, patterning various forms of documentary and ethnography.
17 June 2015
A group of students and teachers gather in an historical mansion in the woods of West Virginia for a week-long retreat in spoken Latin.
18 November 2015
An Unangam Tunuu elder describes cliffs and summits, drifting birds, and deserted shores. A group of students and teachers play and invent games revitalizing their language.
08 September 2017
Filmed during the 2016 Standing Rock protests in South Dakota, Sky Hopinka's Dislocation Blues offers a portrait of the movement and its water protectors, refuting grand narratives and myth-making in favour of individual testimonials.
26 January 2020
An experimental look at the origin of the death myth of the Chinookan people in the Pacific Northwest, following two people as they navigate their own relationships to the spirit world and a place in between life and death.
22 September 2015
The video traverses the history and the memory of a place shared by both the Ho-Chunk and the settler.
09 September 2025
Powwow People is a portrait of a powwow and its participants.
29 April 2017
This film is an homage to the Gaza Strip and to the possibility of hope beyond hopelessness. Ouroboros, the symbol of the snake eating its tail, is both end and beginning: death as regeneration.
10 September 2016
Texts and performances by the late Indigenous poet Diane Burns bind Sky Hopinka’s dazzling and mysterious blend of original and found sources, which continues the filmmaker’s exploration of language, storytelling, and transcendent ways of seeing.
04 January 2018
For Dreaming the Dark: hands that see, eyes that touch, Ana Vaz invited artists and filmmakers whose work trust cinema’s capacity to transform relationships between the body and the camera to propose works that will engage with both perception and embodiment.
20 January 2022
An experimental documentary, Kicking the Clouds is centered on a 50-year-old cassette tape of a Pechanga language lesson between the director’s grandmother and great-grandmother, and contextualized by an interview with his mother in his Pacific Northwest hometown.
17 January 2019
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.
01 January 2020
“In a single day, how many really nonsignifying fields do we cross? Very few, sometimes none. Here I am, before the sea; it is true that it bears no message.
