Where Lappish joik turns to rap, and reindeer to bytes

Inari festival looks for modern Sámi culture through film

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By Kirsikka Moring in Inari, Finnish Lapland
     
      This is the beginning of a 21st century new wave in Finnish cinema.
      It is 11 a.m. on Sunday morning. There is a buzz at the Siida Museum in Inari, and locals in the traditional Lappish costume are on the move. Everyone wants to get a seat for the first screening of Non Profit, a film shot on location at the now-deserted village school in nearby Nellim.
      And there it is. Head and shoulders the most interesting Finnish drama movie for years. A film that thinks as well as acts and asks as much as it provides answers.
     
The images stream out with a magical intensity, tracing a story of ecologically-sustainable existence. A group of researchers equipped with all the trappings of modern high technology move to a remote northern location on a project to see how little energy a community needs to get by. Before long the experiment runs into a crisis, and the graphs on the computer displays flat-line.
      The marsh sucks down the human. Ancient gods and idols and the spirit of the place cause the horizon to shift. The spirits of the dark waters work their spell. Nature exerts its primeval strength, against which the trendily green city-people have no defences.
      The narrative shows how cultural collisions bend fenders. Nature strikes back. It also offers lessons, if anyone is prepared to listen. The hands on the global doomwatch clock are still at five-to. The audience holds its breath and then bursts into loud and sustained applause.
     
The film was completed some hours ago, at 5 o'clock this morning, when the final colour management work was made ready. Non Profit has been in the making for ten years. Things got started during the markka era, but there were delays aplenty en route.
      Pauliina Feodoroff - a member of the Skolt Sámi indigenous minority living in the far north of Finnish Lapland and across the border in North-Western Russia - studied direction at the Theatre Academy in Helsinki, and she wrote the screenplay for the film in 1997. Her then teachers at the Academy Tove Idström and Juha-Pekka Hotinen supported the project enthusiastically. What a great subject! However, that was as far as the support went, at least in terms of financing.
      Finland's first wholly-Sámi feature film is also one of Finland's first indie films, a non-profit production made on a shoestring budget.
     
The production companies showed no interest. No money was forthcoming from the Finnish Film Foundation, nothing was put on the table by the Finnish Broadcasting Company - nobody wanted to back the venture. In the end, the necessary sums were stumped up by the Sámi Council and the Sámi Parliament (see links), by Feodoroff's father, and by Pauliina's 16-year-old cousin Inger-Kaisa, who donated her monthly child allowance.
      The budget was pared to the bone. The filming, done four years ago, cost EUR 13,400, editing was a further EUR 3,500, and the sound recording EUR 6,000. Pauliina's father put in EUR 5,000, and Inger-Kaisa a further 1,300.
     
At the same time, Non Profit is not entirely a Skolt Sámi movie.
      Among the actors are a clutch of talented members of the younger generation from the Theatre Academy, Helsinki's Ylioppilasteatteri and Taiteellinen teatteri theatres, from the Takomo free theatre-group, and many others.
      Not least among the participants are the 200 or so extras from the villages of Nellim and Sevetti, and Feodoroff's own immediate family and relatives and friends. The synergy of generations, languages, and cultures is mightily empowering. The long-lost shamanistic spirits of the Skolt Sámis' forefathers also announce their presence in the crew.
     
The whole vexed question of Sámi identity has been up for consideration in the past week at the ninth holding of Skábmagovat - The Indigenous Peoples' Film Festival.
      Arranged in Inari in January during the Polar Night (and hence the other name of "Reflections of Endless Night"), this annual gathering features dozens of films and documentaries made by and about the Sámi. Each year the festival also spotlights movies made by indigenous peoples in one other country, except that this year the country has been exchanged for the entire continent of Africa.
      Among the questions being asked are how many of the nine living Sámi languages are still living, and how many will survive? How does the Sámi culture live on in those who have scattered to other corners of the world?
      Is the Sámi way of life any longer about the region's a cappella joik singing style, the colourful national dress, enchanting jewellery and handcrafts?
      The biggest and most central question is global. What will happen if the imprint of the people's collective memory disappears, like a trail in a blizzard? Or if the people undergo a cultural lobotomy by turning their thinking in a foreign direction?
      Identity deficit, the disappearance of a person from his or her self, is not a problem for the Sámi alone. This is shown with shocking clarity by Feodoroff's Non Profit when it depicts young seekers after an alternative life.
      "Repairing yourself is slow, and never ends", Pauliina Feodoroff says. Filmmaking does not promote human dignity.
      "The employment office told me to sell tickets at the tourist traps of Saariselkä. Could I have used that money to make a film about the Skolt Sámi world picture?"
      The merger of Sámi culture with mainstream culture is so completely true in Feodoroff's opinion, that "it is absolutely necessary to go on and on about one's own identity".
     
A young Swedish documentary filmmaker Liselotte Wajstedt has just completed a sensitive and self-ironic road-movie type film Sami Deida Joik about a quest. In it, a Stockholm Sámi returns home, travels from Karasjok to Koutokeino, and to Finnish Lapland. She has a tailor produce a blue and white Sami costume for her, but her soul will not join in the process.
      I am envious. What kind of a costume should I put on? One from Karelia or Häme, or an Udmurt costume? All that is left is a cardigan suit off the store shelf.
     
Students at the media programme of the Inari Sámi Adult Education Centre have produced short films in which the experience of Sámi youth is either grim, or typified by a dark kind of humour. Sami girls sit in a wilderness lean-to shouting into mobile telephones, chatting on-line, while the food at a cold campfire is prepared - in a microwave oven.
      Reindeer boys are hot! The picture steams with roundups, where handsome young Sámi men look appealingly at the camera.
      The documentary Saamelainen (Sámi) by Markku Lehmuskallio and Anastasia Lapusin opened the DocPoint festival in Helsinki, but its real première is here. Present are the main characters of the film who tell the stories of their lives: nine Sámi from different parts of the world.
     
The film is cathartic in its lack of ornamentation. People are depicted in their present living environments, pondering their lives, their work, and themselves. The great questions are left throbbing inside the viewer's head. One of the stories shows how the Magga family of reindeer-herding Sámi dresses in their ethnic costumes during Christmas and decorate their most beautiful draught reindeer. They have been hired to work at Ivalo Airport.
      Tourists pour out of a jumbo jet, cameras clicking. The silent reindeer stares at the photographer.
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 30.1.2007


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Uncovering the secrets of the Sámi (14.2.2006)
  Rapper uses Sámi language to express defiance (8.2.2005)

Links:
  Skábmagovat - The Indigenous Peoples´ Film Festival
  Sámi Parliament (Wikipedia)
  Skolt Sámi (Wikipedia)
  Sámi Languages (Wikipedia)

KIRSIKKA MORING / Helsingin Sanomat
kirsikka.moring@hs.fi