Hot Springs 2025: Uncertainty and Camaraderie

Riding from the Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport in Little Rock to Hot Springs, Arkansas to cover the 3rd annual Filmmaker Forum at the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival, I asked the only other industry attendee in the car what he’d be doing at the upcoming event. His response was both startling and perhaps an unsurprising sign of today's federal rescissions times: He didn’t know. A 17-year veteran of Alabama Public Television, Chris Holmes had initially agreed to participate on a panel with other public media reps. Unfortunately, Holmes had also just been let go as Vice President of Production & Digital Studios at APT, thus he wasn’t exactly sure of his role at the three-day filmmaker/industry conference (or job-wise back in Birmingham for that matter). Fortunately, the doc vet would end up being in good company, as grappling with seismic uncertainty proved to be the theme of this year’s event as well.

To read all about it visit Documentary magazine.

“We Wanted to Run It Like a Normal Powwow”: Sky Hopinka on Powwow People

Sky Hopinka is one of those rare filmmakers who seems to possess an instinctual artistic eye. And his latest Powwow People is a “vérité-style documentary grounded in the rhythms, relationships, and lived experience of a contemporary Native gathering” according to its spot-on synopsis. It’s also a beautifully-crafted art film refreshingly not specifically made for the cinephile (i.e., East Coast liberal/Euro) gaze. Indeed, in order to avoid the extractive lens Hopinka, a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation and a descendant of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño people, purposely did not parachute in to capture a powwow “National Geographic” style (as the event’s MC Ruben Littlehead jokes to the camera early on). Instead the MacArthur Fellowship-winning director and his collaborators staged the assembly from scratch themselves. It’s a cinematic project handmade with loving care with and for one’s own community. An experience had from the inside out. Soon after the doc’s Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival premiere (a month after its TIFF debut and before its IDFA premiere), Filmmaker caught up with the visual artist and filmmaker, who was also one of our “25 New Faces 2018.”

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.