“This is for the ghosts” we read in English and Chinook Wawa in one of the subtitles of Małni — Towards the Ocean, Towards the Shore. Sky Hopinka’s first feature-length film is a poetic reflection of life, death and return, and an exploration of identity and belonging from within the Native American experience. Hopinka documents a community’s relationship to their land, their roots and their language. Through a journey led by the stories of the filmmaker’s close friends, Sweetwater Sahme and Jordan Mercier, both members of the Chinook Nation, Hopinka interweaves images, words and sounds in a fluid temporality beyond linear chronology.

The fragmentary assemblage of visual and sonic landscapes, of poetry and myth, and the evocation of ancestral traditions from Indian tribes in the Pacific Northwest, is at the core of Hopinka’s conceptual and aesthetic project. Expanding upon a body of work developed since 2010 in over a dozen experimental short films, Hopinka investigates the role cinema plays in preserving indigenous cultures and challenging colonial modes of representation. Growing up in Ferndale, Washington, in a family affiliated with the Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin and the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians, his childhood was informed by travelling. Both his parents were performers in the powwow circuit (a gathering of indigenous nations to pay tribute to their ancestors). Hopinka’s cinema captures the vibration and spirituality of voices, dances and drumbeats but also the grief of a community dispossessed of their land, whose culture was systematically erased.

The film begins with a contemplative action. The ocean transposes the viewer into a space at once abstract and concrete, material and spiritual. While its rhythms, textures and colours are familiar, there is a melancholic and ethereal quality in this opening shot that confronts us with the unknown cycles of change. As the title of the film suggests, we are in a state of becoming and perpetually transitioning towards a new beginning. Hopinka’s voice as the narrator echoes the search for meaning: “Where are we going now? Maybe we are going to the ocean. Maybe we are going upriver. Maybe downriver (…) Where the people are. Where the people go when they are gone. When they’ve died. Where the spirit world is. Outside (…).”

Language and transmission are recurrent themes in Hopinka’s cinema. What does it mean to learn a language in risk of disappearing? How can a language have its own agency in our mind? As a student, the filmmaker learned to speak Chinook Wawa, an indigenous language of the Pacific Northwest. During that period, he became interested in the histories of his teachers and their connections to dialects of certain regions. In Małni — Towards the Ocean, Towards the Shore the alternate use of subtitles in English or Chinook, and the use of both languages in dialogues or voiceover reasserts how language shapes different cosmologies and world visions.

The film is structured around interviews with Sweetwater and Jordan about their Chinook heritage. Hopinka travels through his friends’ words as they wander through forests, rivers, waterfalls and shores; as they meet at home, as they take a canoe trip, and as they drive along the Columbia River Basin. In this intimate conversation, difficult childhood memories resurface (growing up in oppressive environments, or the challenges of overcoming addiction). There is a sense of loss, a lament. Yet, there is a profound joy in recalling their elders’ path and connecting with their traditions. Under heavy rain, we see Sweetwater, who is pregnant, carrying her child’s first waterfall cleansing ritual. We see Jordan at the ceremony of the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde, which includes over 30 Tribes and bands from western Oregon, northern California, and southwest Washington. In this ecstatic scene, as participants of all ages gather for the performance of the song “New Beginnings”, the camera traces voices, bodies, movements, shapes and sounds in a ghostly-dream-rendering that calls upon the ancestors’ energy.  Here, the filmmaker invokes The Origin of Death Myth as told by Mose B. Hudson, Jordan’s grandfather: Lilu and T’alap’as ask: “what if when people die they come back on the fifth day?” For Hopinka, the belief in reincarnation “expresses the sense of familial continuity” that is so important in Native American cultures.

Between experimental cinema and ethnopoetic documentary, Hopinka seeks to undo the violence contained in traditional forms of ethnography. There is a compelling proposition in his working process: an act of deep listening that leads to new perceptions of how reality might be documented.  In considering empathy and kinship, Hopinka’s Małni — Towards the Ocean, Towards the Shore underlines the soothing potential of communal exchange and solidarity. The result is a celebration of collective resilience in moments of personal and social collapse and, above all, a tribute to those that came before us.