‘Powwow People’ Review: Sky Hopinka’s Stunning New Doc Is a Vital Vision of Modern Indigenous Life

The experimental documentary filmmaker Sky Hopinka has always been an artist capable of crafting the most captivating compositions as he challenges the audience to look deeper at his images. But it’s his latest, the immersive wonder of a documentary “Powwow People,” that represents something of a departure for him. While original in so many ways, it feels most akin to RaMell Ross’ “Hale County This Morning, This Evening.” What that similarly stunning film represents for Alabama, this one does for the Pacific Northwest. 

Though similar in some respects to a key element as his previous feature, the magnificent “Malni – Towards The Ocean, Towards The Shore,” and with the same care of his previous shorts, “Powwow People” is a focused film that takes place primarily in a single location. Specifically, Hopinka sets his sights on a powwow in Seattle that he observes over the course of three days while pondering deeply existential questions about those who attend, what it has represented in the past for them, and where it may be going in the future. Yet even as it may be considered more accessible than his past works, it has the same visual power as anything Hopinka has ever made with incredible sound design and editing that takes your breath away.

There is so much life bursting free from every frame, with moments of humor and joy that are also complicated by the feeling that this moment in time can so easily be lost. It’s an essential film that’s one of the most moving documentaries of the year and further proof of how Hopinka is one of the most exciting filmmakers working today. 

Relying on limited interviews and only using their voices rather than cutting away to them as conventional talking heads, “Powwow People” embodies what more documentaries ought to be. While still informative and illuminating, it’s also incredible in how fully it places us in the moment. It’s experiential in a way that makes you feel as though you can hear the songs echoing through your mind, like you’re there yourself.

We see glimpses of everything from organizers doing the critical work of getting everything set up, to a moment of young children already with the rhythm of the drum running through them as they bang away on the bleachers. It’s about taking time to sit with the things that make up life and community without ever feeling the need to overexplain what it is we are seeing. Hopinka never holds our hand in terms of how he presents the powwow, but you feel his confidence guiding us deeper into the potent feelings it provides all the same. 

This ensures the film is not only never didactic, but completely arresting in how it begins to dance with its many resonant ideas. It’s funny as well — the emcee of the powwow is a standout. When he talks about how quickly the children in attendance have and will grow up, you hear in his voice and feel in Hopinka’s every shot a sadness about how every beautiful moment we see here is also inevitably finite. 

Hopinka has made a quietly monumental, breathtaking film that expresses the full scope of the emcee’s observation about time passing us by. When we then get an extended sequence, playing out over several stunning unbroken minutes, at the end where the filmmaker patiently lets us observe one final dance with the bright lights shining down, the film cuts through darkness. It makes it not just one of the best films Hopinka has made yet, but one of the most vital documentaries of the 21st century. 

by Chase Hutchinson