✸ Refle-x-périmental #24 : Trails
Experimental Indigenous Films ✸ 

► Refle-x-périmental #24 presents a selection of contemporary experimental documentaries created by Indigenous filmmakers. The program highlights the formal experiments of a generation of Indigenous artists shaping cinemas that are politically and aesthetically positioned outside the “national orthodoxy,” celebrating what Māori filmmaker and author Barry Barclay called the Fourth Cinema. The films explore the traces and trails connecting past and future across geographical, archival, and familial territories, thus unfolding multiple viewpoints and stories of sovereignty and freedom.

The screening is introduced by Beatriz Rodovalho (Cinédoc, IRCAV) with the support of the association De la Plume à l’Écran, as part of the course “Indigenous Cinemas” at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle (Department of Cinema and Audiovisual Studies).

Thanks to: Sophie Gergaud, Tainá Bouffay, ONF/NFB, Video Data Bank, Rede Katahirine.

► Screening 

The Violence of a Civilization Without Secrets
Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil, Jackson Polys
USA, 2018, digital, color, sound, 10'

An urgent reflection on indigenous sovereignty, the undead violence of museum archives, and postmortem justice through the case of the “Kennewick Man,” a prehistoric Paleo-American man whose remains were found in Kennewick, Washington, in 1996.

Mobilize
Caroline Monnet
Canada, 2015, digital, color, sound, 3'

This short film, part of the “Souvenir” series and crafted entirely out of NFB archival footage by First Nations filmmaker Caroline Monnet, takes us on an exhilarating journey from the Far North to the urban South, capturing the perpetual negotiation between the traditional and the modern by a people moving ever forward. 

Kicking the Clouds 
Sky Hopinka
USA, 2021, 16 mm to digital, color, sound, 15’35

“This film is a reflection on descendants and ancestors, guided by a 50 year old audio recording of my grandmother learning the Pechanga language from her mother.   After being given this tape by my mother, I interviewed her and asked about it, and recorded her ruminations on their lives and her own.  The footage is of our chosen home in Whatcom County, Washington, where my family still lives, far from our homelands in Southern California, yet a home nonetheless.” – Sky Hopinka

Jáaji Approx.
Sky Hopinka
USA, 2015, digital, color, sound, 7’40

“Logging and approximating a relationship between audio recordings of my father and videos gathered of the landscapes we have both separately traversed. The initial distance between the logger and the recordings, of recollections and of songs, new and traditional, narrows while the images become an expanding semblance of filial affect. Jáaji is a near translation for directly addressing a father in the Hočak language.” – Sky Hopinka

kuifi ül/ Sonido antiguo
Francisco Huichaqueo Pérez
Chile, 2020, digital, color, sound, 10'

Filmed on the first day of Wiñol tripantü [Mapuche New Year], kuifi ül is inhabited by the song of the trutruka, a wind instrument that resonates in the hills and throughout the territory for several days during the ceremony. Within the installation, the sound aims to awaken Mapuche objects – a kultrün, a pifüllka, a metawe – normally in the custody of a German museum, removed from the hands that created them.

Three Thousand
Asinnajaq
Canada, 2017, digital, color, sound, 14’

Inuit artist Asinnajaq plunges us into a sublime imaginary universe – a luminescent, archive-inspired cinema that recasts the past, present and future of the Inuit in a radiant  new light. 

Faísca/ Spark
Bárbara Matias Kariri
Brazil, 2025, digital, color, sound, 11’ 

After a family conflict, four women from different generations find themselves brought together by an ancestral secret. Between silences and rituals, they try to rebuild the bonds that time has broken. Ancestry reveals itself through gestures, dreams, and their connection with nature. Gradually, profound revelations transform their lives. The past returns to guide them on a path of healing and belonging.