Persistence of Vision Award: Sky Hopinka + maɬni—towards the ocean, towards the shore

In Conversation

  • Beth Piatote is an Associate Professor in the UC Berkeley Departments of Comparative Literature and English. She is a scholar of Native American/Indigenous literature and law; a writer of fiction, poetry, plays, and essays; and an Indigenous language revitalization activist/healer specializing in Nez Perce language and literature.

featuring

Sweetwater Sahme, Jordan Mercier, Travis Mercier,

Established in 1997, the Persistence of Vision Award honors the achievement of a filmmaker whose main body of work falls outside the realm of narrative feature filmmaking. This year the award goes to Sky Hopinka.

Bodies of water ebb and flow throughout this poetic experimental documentary by filmmaker Hopinka. Honoring connections to nature and the cycles of life, maɬni (pronounced “moth-nee”) separately follows the wanderings of Sweetwater Sahme and Jordan Mercier as they share their personal rituals and relationships to life, identity, language, and their homeland. Meditative and beautifully photographed, the film sonically weaves in the origin-of-death myth from the Chinookan people. Hopinka has crafted a lush exploration of afterlife, rebirth, and the place in between.

SFFILM
FILM DETAILS 
Screenwriter
  • Sky Hopinka
Cinematographer
  • Sky Hopinka
Language
  • English
  • Chinuk Wawa
  • with English subtitles
Print Info
  • Color
  • DCP
  • 80 mins
Source
  • SFFILM

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