A Sacred Place: Film Screening and Conversation with Dr. Dolly Kikon

Please join us for the world premiere of A Sacred Place (2026), by Professor Dolly Kikon (Anthropology). The film tells the story of stones, spirits, and salt springs in Makhel. The film focuses on intergenerational storytellers and their relationship with the land. It integrates visual ethnography, oral tradition, and geological features of Makhel to center Indigenous pedagogy, community history, and ecology. After the screening, Professor Clementine Bordeaux (HAVC) will provide comments and facilitate a conversation with Kikon and audience member participants.

Makhel in Mao Naga language means a sacred place. Can sacredness exist amid ecocide in our times? Seeking an answer, the film follows life as it unfolds in the mountains of Makhel, a Naga village in northern Manipur. These mountains are composed of sandstones, shales, and siltstones. The sandstone monoliths across the landscape are symbols of ancient alliance and kinship between spirits and humans. The story of the land is also stored in the salt springs, ancient seawater retained in shale soil, a geological feature of these mountains. Geographically part of the Eastern Himalayas, the salt springs of Makhel were formed through sedimentation under an ancient equatorial ocean around 50 million years ago. Naga ancestors regarded these geological features as abodes for spirit custodians and cared for them. A Sacred Place is the story of land narrated by Naga storytellers, as humans prioritize relentless development forgetting their relationship with human and other beings.

Learn more about A Sacred Place. 

This screening is a hybrid event. Remote participants will receive a link to the film before the event to watch on their own. They may join the conversation via Zoom.

Please RSVP to register for this event. Register here. Any questions can be directed to seacoast@ucsc.edu

This event is graciously co-sponsored by UCSC’s Center for Southeast Asian Coastal Interactions, Center for South Asian Studies, Indigenous Faculty Network, and The Humanities Institute.