Kicking the Clouds
Sky Hopinka's films are complex, sensory and dreamlike investigations of how it feels to stand between cultures, and of how identity is shaped by aspects such as homeland, landscape and language. They mix the documentary with the mythological, bring different times and places together through a non-linear and associative juxtaposition of sound and image. Hopinka's family and friends, the domestic here and now, are put in active dialogue with the time of their ancestors and mothers, and with a landscape shaped by stories of belonging and exclusion.
Hopinka has described his work as ethnopoetic visions, as a response to the objectifying ethnographic gaze that has been imposed on indigenous peoples for centuries. Rather than films that objectify and control their subject, Hopinka makes films about indigenous peoples' culture and identity from an inquisitive, personal and unassuming point of view.
About the film
Kicking the Clouds centers around a 50 year old audio recording of a Pechanga language lesson between the director’s grandmother and great-grandmother. It is contextualized by an interview Hopinka conducted with his mother in his hometown, Ferndale, Washington. The film is a reflection on descendants and ancestors with language and nature to navigate.
About the filmmaker
Sky Hopinka (b. 1984) is a poet, filmmaker and artist and a Ho-Chunk Nation national and descendent of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians. In Portland, Oregon he studied and taught chinuk wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin. He received his BA from the Portland State University in Liberal Arts and his MFA in Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. In recent years, Hopinka has shown his films at a number of renowned festivals and exhibitions around the world, such as the Whitney Biennial, imagineNATIVE Media + Arts Festival, New York Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival and Copenhagen DOX.
Hopinka was a guest curator at the 2019 Whitney Biennial and was a part of Cosmopolis #2 at the Centre Pompidou. He was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University (2018-2019), Sundance Art of Nonfiction Fellow (2019) and a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow. Together with Almudena Escobar López, he is the co-curator of the renowned Flaherty Film Seminar in 2022.