Frame Rate: malni – towards the ocean, towards the shore

 Join Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND), FILM at LACMA and The Autry Museum of the American West for a co-presented virtual screening of Sky Hopinka’s małni – towards the ocean, towards the shore. The film will be followed by a post-screening conversation with the director.

The first full-length feature film by director Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk / Pechanga) is a poetic exploration in his signature style, seen here in the first L.A. screening following the world premiere at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. A narrator follows Sweetwater Sahme and Jordan Mercier’s perambulations through their worlds—sometimes overlapping, sometimes not—as they wonder and wander through the afterlife, rebirth, and the place in-between. Spoken mostly in chinuk wawa, a language indigenous to the Columbia river Basin, their stories are departures from the Chinookan origin of death myth, with its distant beginning and circular shape.

małni – towards the ocean, towards the shore

2020, 82 minutes | Directed by Sky Hopinka with Sweetwater Sahme and Jordan Mercier

About the Artist 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 is currently based out of Vancouver B.C. and Milwaukee, WI. He began making films in Portland in 2011 when he also began studying and teaching 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.

Frame Rate: malni – towards the ocean, towards the shore is curated for LAND by Matthew Schum.

Frame Rate is LAND’s screening series, presenting film, video, and moving image works in site-specific contexts. Reflecting the diverse ways contemporary artists engage with visual culture, Frame Rate allows audiences intimate access to artists’ works and creative process. Unlike conventional formats, Frame Rate invites artists to propose and present new work, works-in-progress or ideas that comprise the multifaceted influences informing their creative practice.

This co-presentation is made possible by a grant from the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs.