SKY HOPKINA:

My name is Sky Hopinka. You’re looking at the film, I’ll remember you as you were, not as what you’ll become, from 2016. I like to think of this film as an elegy to the poet Diane Burns, and also a rumination on different ideas around reincarnation as my tribe, the Ho-Chunk Nation, believes in. It’s how those ways of thinking about life and death outside of a Christian context could function in a cinematic space. 

Diane Burns passed away just before I encountered her poetry in the mid-two thousands, and that felt like a missed chance to meet her. But it was really special to find her words, especially as I began writing on my own and making my own films. There’s a sequence in the middle of the film. It’s archival footage of Diane reciting some poetry, and then I overlay these images that I had taken at night. 

One was a giant cross, and there was something about her tone and authority and her reading that it felt like this was a moment of fun or play to have this cross dancing and all the way around its symbolism. I filmed parallel dancers, and that sequence is heavily abstracted because I really wanted the audience to focus on the dancing and the movements and the colors rather than the spectacle of the power. 

Abstraction, for me, has been a way of protecting the subjects and protecting the content and protecting these histories. That’s been exploited by anthropologists, by ethnographers, by filmmakers. There’s always been some loss, whether it’s cultural knowledge or exploitative knowledge, through documentation of things that shouldn’t be documented. I’m trying to give a sense of agency or ownership of this information, of these histories, of these documents back to the people that they were taken from. 

I make work for an Indigenous audience. You can watch if you’re not part of those communities, but just know that I’m not going to be doing a lot of explaining. And I don’t think it’s a lot to ask a non-Indigenous audience to try and keep up a little bit or to try and ask questions later on, or to just stop and listen.