Film Screening: Shimmering with Matte Hewitt, MFA

The Center for Documentary Arts and Research (CDAR) and the UCSC American Indian Resource Center (AIRC) are honored to invite you to the Shimmering Film Screening and Q&A Discussion with invited Guest Panelists, on Friday, November 14th, 2025 in Studio C of the Communications Building at UC Santa Cruz.

SHIMMERING (2025, 20 min) is an essay film poetically investigating creation, extraction, and second lives. Guided by the luminous figure of Hummingbird, SHIMMERING moves through place-based ways of knowing, tracing the entanglement between biological studies of hummingbirds and the rise of military drone technology. The film also features storytelling and insights from Mutsun Ohlone and Tribal Chair of Indian Canyon, Kanyon “Coyote Woman” Sayers-Roods. Through interwoven narratives of land, militarization, taxidermy, Native regalia, the filmmaker’s relationship with their trans identity—and with a hummingbird they name Anna–the filmmaker learns about Central California Native Land and culture. Blurring the lines between documentary, personal letter, and ecological study, the film invites viewers to consider new forms of kinship across species, systems, and histories.Gentle yet provocative, SHIMMERING offers a multispecies meditation on knowledge, power, and connection.

Following the film screening will be a Q&A Discussion facilitated by Associate Professor Selmin Kara who will be joined by the filmmaker, Matte Hewitt, a film participant, Gizelle Hurtado, and a film interlocutor Angel Riotutar, Director of the UCSC American Indian Resource Center. With respect to Native American Heritage Month, Angel will speak with us about learning as a non-Native person. How do we do so respectfully and with reciprocity?