Spoken almost entirely in the Indigenous Northwest language Chinuk Wawa, maɬni (pronounced “moth-nee”) follows the wanderings and wonderings of Sweetwater Sahme and Jordan Mercier. Sky Hopinka’s debut feature film takes root in the Chinookan origin story of death, using language as an expression of culture following the lives of these two characters in their surrounding nature as they contemplate the circularity of life, death, and all that is in-between. 2020, US, DCP, in chinuk wawa with English subtitles, 80 min.
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Bio
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. 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, and designs of language as containers of culture expressed through personal, documentary, and nonfiction forms of media.
Hopinka’s work has played at various festivals including Sundance, Toronto International Film Festival, Ann Arbor, Courtisane Festival, Punto de Vista, and the New York Film Festival. His work was a part of the 2017 Whitney Biennial, the 2018 FRONT Triennial, and Prospect.5 in 2021. He was a guest curator at the 2019 Whitney Biennial in New York and participated in Cosmopolis #2 at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. He had a solo exhibition at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, in 2020 and in 2022 at LUMA in Arles, France. Hopinka was a recipient of a 2020 Alpert Award for Film/Video, a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, and a 2021 Forge Project Fellow. He received the 2022 Infinity Award in Art from the International Center of Photography and is a 2022 MacArthur Fellow.
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