Full Aperture: Sky Hopinka

$8 general admission; $5 NOFS and NOVAC members, students and seniors (60+) all with valid ID

FILMMAKER IN ATTENDANCE!

We are proud to present Sky Hopinka, a filmmaker who is emerging as an essential cinematic voice. Hopinka’s films are full of small surprises that raise deep questions about communication, identity, and the possibility of understanding. At the core, he is documenting indigenous communities and spaces, and his camera drifts patiently through them, observant, alighting on details that seem to expand our understanding. But suddenly the scene is destabilized – an image flipped upside down, a doubled image blurring in a mind-bending way, a subtitle appearing when no words are audible. The cumulative effect of these resourceful moves is that we are never sure of what it is we’re seeing, what the filmmaker is seeing, and whether it’s even possible to know this. He expresses these ideas with poetic resourcefulness, using digital cinematography to capture stunning colors and textures in his surroundings. Hopinka’s films remain resolutely open-minded, insisting that the viewers find their own ways of understanding.

Sky Hopinka is a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation.  He was born and raised in Ferndale, Washington and spent several years in Southern California, and Portland, Oregon.  In Portland, he studied and taught chinuk wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin. His work centers around personal positions of homeland and landscape, designs of language and facets of culture contained within, and the known and the unknowable.  His work has played at various festivals and exhibitions including ImagineNATIVE, Images Festival, Wavelengths, Ann Arbor Film Festival, AFI, Sundance, Projections, Out of Sight Seattle, the 2016 Wisconsin Triennial and the 2017 Whitney Biennial.  He was awarded the More with Less Award at the 2016 Images Festival, the Tom Berman Award for Most Promising Filmmaker at the 54th Ann Arbor Film Festival, 3rd Prize at the 2015 Media City Film Festival, and the New Cinema Award at the 2017 Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival. He currently lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and is an adjunct lecturer at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and University of Illinois-Chicago.

Thank you to our Community Partners: New Orleans Film Society and NOVAC.