Powwow People

Visionary director Sky Hopinka’s Powwow People invites audiences into the vibrant orbit of a powwow. And not as detached observers but as welcomed participants. Both a celebration and a radiant assertion of sovereignty, Hopinka’s second feature immerses viewers in a globally iconic First Nations event, rendered here with a cinematic language that defies easy categorization.

Eschewing conventional documentary structures and narration, Hopinka deploys direct verité with subtlety and atmospheric precision to open intimate spaces where dancers, singers, and drummers prepare to enter the circle. Among them: a charismatic emcee, a Two-Spirit dancer imagining new futures, and a host of intergenerational presences that mark time in gesture, regalia, and rhythm.

Shot over three days and unfolding across the arc of a single one, the film moves from daylight into darkness, where the participants’ arrivals, preparations, and performances braid memory, motion, humour, and cultural resonance, culminating in a mesmeric 30-minute unbroken shot of a Northern Traditional dance special.

A multidisciplinary artist and academic whose work has reshaped the aesthetics of Indigenous cinema, Hopinka continues to reconfigure how we look at, listen to, and witness Indigenous experiences. With Powwow People, he subverts the extractive lens of ethnography, co-organizing the powwow itself and inviting the dancers, vendors, singers, and spectators into a consciously constructed collaboration for film. This is not a document of a powwow. It is a powwow in cinematic form.

JASON RYLE