Sky Hopinka’s elegant, stunning, experimental film is a well-balanced piece between an art, experimental, abstract film, and a documentary. This ominous ethereal film digs into the legend of Chinookan. The music and long shots of their natural landscape bring us closer to their world, which we forget is right next to our daily cosmopolitan modern civilization. It is an excellent display of how Native Americans live their lives and culture.
Sweetwater Sahme and Jordan Mercier navigate throughout their live, world, environment, and spirituality discussing their lives, views, and hopes. In general, the film seeks the ‘it’ that makes us human, here and beyond. An outstanding experimental is an essential biographical portrait of present-day Native life. Sweetwater Sahme and Jordan Mercier connecting to the world is as beautiful as before they were forced into a new way of life.
Malni – Towards the Ocean, Towards the Shore is a reminder that we, the modern society, often forget, do not do anything, or give as much attention to the Native American community as it justly deserved. In today’s world, we are so consumed with the gender, orientation, and African American equality fight that we forget that the first and most affected in the Americas were Native Americans. Sweetwater Sahme and Jordan Mercier travel different lives and journeys, considering life, death, and birth while living in a society that almost completely destroyed their way of life.
As David Michael Smith of the University of Houston argues in his paper, Counting the Dead: Estimating the Loss of Life in the Indigenous Holocaust, 1492-Present that Russell Thornton’s American Journal of Physical Anthropology’s estimation of 70 million native population is way off. Smith says, “Thornton’s estimated hemispheric population decline of 70 million is multiplied by 2.5, the total number of Indigenous deaths throughout the Western Hemisphere between 1492 and 1900 appears to be about 175 million.” I believe that films and works like Malni – Towards the Ocean, Towards the Shore are needed and necessary in today’s society. We need to be constantly to be reminded that we all should and must remember, honor, respect, and work vigorously to repair the unsettling genocide that was done to the natives in the Americas.
Hopinka’s film has a perceptive that gives me the impression that it is sincere how much such a large culture and community struggles and strives after being almost decimated in a world that is hugely different for the way from theirs and the way they see and live life. Yet, the film also displays well how, although today’s is remarkably different, Native Americans still see the world in a long, calm, and serene way, appreciating life, nature, and anything around us.
Hopinka’s portrayal of the community, lifestyle, and way of life is well balanced with the eerie and delicate style the film edited together, without any rush to get anywhere, but to live the moment is right in front of them accepting the difficulties. All while keeping their cultural integrity and beliefs. Ending the film connecting it all in a journey of life throughout nature, the present, past, and hope to harmonious life and future.