Indiginous cinema immersion — maɬni

Race Brook Lodge celebrates Indigenous People’s Day Weekend and the cyclic flow of life, death and afterlife in a screening of maɬni – towards the ocean, towards the shore (2020).

This is the first feature-length film of Indigenous American artist and filmmaker Sky Hopinka, who is credited for direction, cinematography and editing. Of Ho-Chunk and Pechanga ancestry, Hopinka is known for previous works that consist of experimental, biographical docu-shorts, intimately focused on Native American reflections.

Ethnographic documentary has historically been used as a tool by colonial filmmakers to exoticize non-Western communities and cast themselves as white saviors. Films challenge that power dynamic in beautiful and inventive ways with a fluid style that always works in service of the oral histories and folklore of Native peoples.

An elegiac immersion, małni – towards the ocean, towards the shore examines how mythology continues to inform the work of younger Chinookan generations who are carving out their own path in the Pacific Northwest. These young subjects realize that growing up can be an act of forgetting, and in Hopinka’s film they make clear that it remains essential to actively seek out ways to remember.

małni becomes a testament to spiritual malleability, meandering through thickly forested pathways and riding on gigantic wooden canoes down the curving rivers. The film raises a subversive mirror to our consumerist culture blighted by a deficit of spirit and driven by domination.

Classifying maɬni — towards the ocean, towards the shore as a documentary or even an “experimental documentary” does not do it justice. It is an Indigenous weave. It is dreamscape. It is participation. It is a promise.

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