Sky Hopinka makes films, videos, installations and photographs that have been viewed in cinema, museum and electronic spaces. His first feature-length work, maɬni – towards the ocean, towards the shore, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2020. His book of collected writings and text-based art, Around the Edge of Encircling Lake was published in 2018. Recognizing the indivisibility of the aesthetic and the political, personal and mythic storytelling, and cosmological and visceral worlds, Hopinka investigates how words, image, sound and montage construct worldviews and create a space for poetry and understanding. He looks at ecology, place, dispossession, language, identity, and family through the formal possibilities of moving-image processes. Serving as instigators of dialogue, his art rests on the understanding that process is more powerful than certainty and proposes what Indigenous cinema can be.

“I try to use formal tactics, cultural context, tribal context, and the abandonment of didactics to try and make stories and experiences coalesce, while being for a specific audience but not turning anyone away.”