maɬni—towards the ocean, towards the shore by Sky Hopinka
April 7–8, 2023, 7 pm
$12 ($10 Walker members, seniors, students)
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.
ABOUT THE FILMMAKER
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.
Goodbye, Dragon Inn by Tsai Ming-liang
Thursday, April 20, 2023, 7 pm
$12 ($10 Walker members, seniors, students)
“THE best film of the past 125 years.” —Apichatpong Weerasethakul
The Fu-Ho movie palace is closing down. On its final night, King Hu’s martial arts epic Dragon Inn plays to a cavernous, near-empty cinema. The film follows a cast of characters that includes the cinema’s workers and audiences, among which are two actors from Hu’s film watching 1967 versions of themselves onscreen. Moving through the hallways, backrooms, and rows of red velvet seats, the line between corporeal and ethereal becomes increasingly blurred. Are these figures real, or are they ghosts haunting the architecture? Part homage, part séance, Tsai Ming-liang’s impeccably wrought, meditative narrative is both a celebration of and a lament for the communal experience of cinema. 2003, Taiwan, DCP, in Mandarin with English subtitles, 82 min.
Introduction by Apichatpong Weerasethakul.
ABOUT THE FILMMAKER
Taiwanese auteur Tsai Ming-liang (b. Malaysia, 1957) premiered his debut feature Rebels of the Neon God at the Berlinale in 1992. He won the Golden Lion award at the Venice Film Festival in 1994 with Vive L’Amour and won the jury award at Berlin for The River in 1996. In 2009, Face became the first film to be included in the collection of the Louvre. Calling the attention of the art world, Tsai participates in various art exhibitions introducing new modes for viewing cinema. His recent film Days (2020) won the Jury Award at the 2020 Berlin International Film Festival and screened at the Walker Cinema in January 2022.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul in Conversation with Sky Hopinka
Saturday, April 22, 2023, 2 pm
$12 ($10 Walker members, seniors, and students)
On the occasion of the return visit to the Walker of Cannes Film Festival Palme d’Or winning artist and filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul is joined by Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians), an artist who has long admired Weerasethakul, to organize a screening of the Thai director’s short films. With their overlapping interests in place, culture, and ghosts, Hopinka will lead an onstage dialogue with Weerasethakul that delves into a metaphysical cinema.
ABOUT THE FILMMAKERS
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.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul (b. Thailand, 1970) has gained worldwide attention for his artistic and groundbreaking experimental films. Before his 2010 feature Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives became the first Thai film to win the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, Weerasethakul was celebrated in 2004 as subject of a Walker Dialogue and Retrospective. This was followed in 2012 with his Walker-commissioned work Cactus River, a short film that debuted on the new online Walker Channel. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is a part of the Walker’s Ruben/Bentson Moving Image Collection.
A maker of films and video shorts since 1994, Weerasethakul completed his first feature in 2000. Now recognized as a major international visual artist, he has also mounted exhibitions and installations in many countries since 1998. Lyrical and often fascinatingly mysterious, Weerasethakul’s film works are nonlinear, dealing with memory and in subtle ways invoking personal politics and social issues. Working independently of the Thai commercial film industry, he devotes himself to promoting experimental and independent filmmaking through his company, Kick the Machine Films, founded in 1999, which also produces all his films. Memoria (2021) screened at the Walker in June 2022.
The African Desperate by Martine Syms
April 28–29, 2023, 7 pm
$12 ($10 Walker members, seniors, and students)
Martine Syms’s debut feature film tracks the final 24 hours of grad school for Palace Bryant, an MFA student in Upstate New York. Palace (played by frequent Syms collaborator Diamond Stingily) moves through a day that is constantly on the edge of unraveling as she navigates the complexities of friends, lovers, and the microaggressions of the white art academic establishment, with a cutting blend of humor and social commentary. 2022, US, DCP, 97 min.
A conversation with Martine Syms follows Friday’s screening.
ABOUT THE FILMMAKER
Martine Syms (US, b. 1988) holds an MFA from Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Syms has earned wide recognition for a practice that combines conceptual grit, humor, and social commentary. Using a combination of video, installation, and performance, often interwoven with explorations into technique and narrative, Syms examines representations of Blackness and its relationship to vernacular, feminist thought, and radical traditions. She has had solo exhibitions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Bergen Kunsthall, Secession, Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work is in the collections of the Hammer Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, Perez Art Museum, Stedelijk Museum, Tate Modern, and the Walker Art Center.