Ma?ni – Towards the Ocean, Towards the Shore
Livestream Q&A with the Director: Wednesday, March 9 at 7:30pm EST
(2020, Sky Hopinka, USA, 82 min, in English and Chinuk Wawa w/ English subtitles)
Guests: Sky Hopinka (filmmaker) and Laura McGough, UMass Amherst
Introduced by: Jacqueline Urla, UMass Amherst
Ma?ni – Towards the ocean, Towards the Shore the debut feature film by Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk/Pechanga) follows Sweetwater Sahme and Jordan Mercier as they wander through nature and the spirit world, contemplating their afterlife, rebirth, and death. Spoken mostly in chinuk wawa, this experimental documentary offers a poetic inquiry into the death myth of the Chinookan people in the Pacific Northwest. Hopinka’s signature lush visual imagery and captivating sound design combine to create a portrait of the natural world and its cycles of life and death.
Watch and Participate
Introduction by Jacqueline Urla
Film Screening
Available through the festival platform Sparq starting March 3
Introduction by Jacqueline Urla
Live Conversation and Q&A with Filmmaker
via Facebook or YouTube
(Wed, March 9 at 7:30pm EST)
All events are free and open to the public.
Access Sparq with your Gmail and Apple ID, or UMass Amherst email address.
About the Filmmaker
Sky Hopinka
“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, Wisconsin. 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, designs of language as containers of culture expressed through personal, documentary, and non fiction forms of media. He received his BA from Portland State University in Liberal Arts and his MFA in Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and currently teaches at Bard College in Film and Electronic Arts.
His 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. He was a guest curator at the 2019 Whitney Biennial and participated in Cosmopolis #2 at the Centre Pompidou. He has had solo exhibitions at the Great Poor Farm Experiment in 2019 and at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, in 2020. He was awarded the Tom Berman Award for Most Promising Filmmaker at the 54th Ann Arbor Film Festival, the New Cinema Award at the Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival and the Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowship for Individual Artists in the Emerging artist category for 2018. He was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University in 2018- 2019, a Sundance Art of Nonfiction Fellow for 2019, an Art Matters Fellow in 2019, a recipient of a 2020 Alpert Award for Film/Video, a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, and is a 2021 Forge Project Fellow.” (Hopinka)
About the Introducer and Moderator
Jacqueline Urla
Jacqueline Urla is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research has primarily focused on activism to protect minority languages in Europe, with a special focus on the Basque Country of Northern Spain. She is a past Scholar in Residence of the School of Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico and the recipient of fellowships from the National Science Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Social Science Research Council. Dr. Urla has been a faculty member at the University of Massachusetts Amherst since 1990 and held various leadership roles as Chair of Anthropology, Director of the Modern European Studies Program, interim Director of the Interdepartmental Film Studies Program, and currently directs the Douglass Chair in Basque Cultural Studies. She became Dean of the Graduate School in January 2021.
https://works.bepress.com/jacqueline_urla/
Laura McGough
Laura McGough is a media art historian and curator who locates her practice at the intersection of contemporary visual and media arts. Her research as both a curator and a scholar focuses on artists’ appropriation of emerging technologies and is articulated through exhibitions, screenings, essays, and digital humanities projects.
McGough has curated exhibitions, screenings and online content for arts organizations, festivals and museums in the U.S., Canada, and Europe at sites including the Art Gallery of Victoria, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center, Harvard Film Archives, the Images Festival Toronto, Washington Project for the Arts/Corcoran, the Walker Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, New York University and the University of Maryland at Baltimore County.
From 2000-2003, she served as the Multidisciplinary Specialist at the National Endowment for the Arts, focusing on technology-based initiatives. McGough holds an M.A. from New York University, and a PhD from SUNY University at Buffalo.