In September, TILT-SHIFT welcomes filmmaker Matte Hewitt for an advanced screening and discussion of Shimmering (2025), and Flying Jewels (2024). These short, experimental documentaries emerge from years of field work and intensive  research into how US military technology, Indigenous knowledge systems, and local ecology come together in the figure of the hummingbird. 

Hewitt's films will be presented before Harun Farocki's Eye/Machine II (2002) and Sky Hopinka's Dislocation Blues (2017), two works that also consider state violence, optics, and sovereignty. An audience conversation will follow.

TILT-SHIFT, referring to a pair of interactions between a camera lens and the image plane, is a film series about moving images and politics. TILT-SHIFT invites guest filmmakers to screen their work alongside a film that helped inspire it, and discuss with audiences how their work connects to longer lineages of radical cinema and anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist struggle. Curated by UCSC Film and Digital Media PhD. student alex cruse, this series intends to connect conversations about aesthetics and form to work being done on the ground.

Matte Hewitt is an interdisciplinary filmmaker, researcher, and environmentalist from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Their work integrates oral storytelling and place-based knowledge with environmental humanities, critical Indigenous, feminist science, and military technology studies. They are a 2024-25 Norris Center Art and Science Fellow, a Mentor for high school students in the Science Internship Program, and they are currently completing a certificate in the Science and Justice Center Training Program at UC Santa Cruz. Matte began their documentary production training at Scribe Video Center, a media center for social change and community empowerment in West Philadelphia. With over a decade of experience, they have contributed to numerous nonprofit organizations and collective art spaces. Matte holds an MFA in Social Documentation at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a BFA in Sculpture from the Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University.

Shimmering (dir. Matte Hewitt, 2025)

Total Run Time: 20:21

HD video, stereo, color

A poetic documentary essay that moves with Hummingbird as a luminous guide through place-based ways of knowing. The filmmaker learns about Central California Native Land and culture with Kanyon “Coyote Woman” Sayers-Roods, Mutsun Ohlone activist, artist, educator, and current Chairwoman of Indian Canyon Nation. Threading together interwoven narratives and learning lessons from Coyote, the film also traces the entanglement between the study of hummingbird biology and the rise of military drone technology, offering a multispecies perspective on knowledge, power, and kinship. 

Flying Jewels (dir. Matte Hewitt, 2024)

Total Run Time: 10:00 (I may add 1 or 2 minutes to the end)

HD video, stereo, color

Blending found footage with political critique, Flying Jewels is an experimental essay film documenting the development of military drone technology–from the study of hummingbird flight patterns to aerial surveillance systems. Presented in a storybook format, the film imagines how Hummingbird might narrate their transformation from an awe-inspiring being into a tool used for war. With sound design composed primarily of hummingbirds recordings, drone hums, and nature documentary music, Flying Jewels is an invitation for viewers to reflect on the ethics and surrealist futures of biotechnological mimicry and the militarization of sacred living systems. 

Eye/Machine II (dir. Harun Farocki, 2002)

Total Run Time: 15:49

HD, Mono, B&W and Color

"How can the distinction between "man" and "machine" still be made given today's technology? In modern weapons technology the categories are on the move: intelligence is no longer limited to humans. In Eye/Machine II, Farocki has brought together visual material from both military and civilian sectors, showing machines operating intelligently and what it is they see when working on the basis of image processing programs. The traditional man-machine distinction becomes reduced to "eye/machine", where cameras are implanted into the machines as eyes. 

As a result of the Gulf War, the technology of warfare came to provide an innovative impulse, which boosted the development of civilian production. Farocki shows us computer simulated images looking like something out of science-fiction films: rockets steer towards islands set in a shining sea; apartment blocks are blown up; fighter aircraft fire at one another with rockets and defend themselves with virtual flares… These computer battlefields--will they suffice or shall we need further rationalization drives for new wars? Eye/Machine II is the continuation of a wider examination of the same subject: intelligent machines and intelligent weapons. 

(Antje Ehmann)

Dislocation Blues (dir. Sky Hopinka, 2017)

Total Run Time: 16:57

HD video, stereo, color

An incomplete and imperfect portrait of reflections from Standing Rock. Shaawan Francis Keahna recounts his experiences entering, being at, and leaving the camp and the difficulties and the reluctance in looking back with a clear and critical eye. Terry Running Wild describes what his camp is like, and what he hopes it will become.

(Sky Hopinka)