Joanne Sargent
Contributor
Sami Blood is a story based on the 1930s Scandinavian practice of removing Indigenous children from their parents and traditional culture, and forcibly integrating them into an educational system that taught them their customs and lifestyle were inferior at best. The children of the Sami people, a nomadic Indigenous population that raises reindeer in Lapland, were victims of this practice, which was purportedly to raise them to a level “acceptable” to the rest of Swedish society. Of course the parallels to Canada’s odious residential school system are obvious. Swedish-Sami writer and director Amanda Kernell based this story on the experience of her own grandmother.
The movie begins with an aging woman reluctantly travelling to Lapland to the funeral of her estranged younger sister. She is clearly unhappy about having to make the trip and re-encounter the culture she left many years before. After the traditional Sami ceremony, where she feels uncomfortably separate, she escapes to her hotel room, as she can no longer avoid a past she’s been trying to forget since she was a teenage girl…
Fourteen-year-old Elle Marja and her younger sister Njenna are living in Lapland with their newly widowed mother. The girls are forced to go to a boarding school, where they’re not allowed to speak their native language, and are subject to discrimination and abuse within the school, and taunting insults by Swedes from the neighbouring community. Elle Marja endures a particularly traumatic experience when a doctor visits the school and subjects the children to medical examinations including skull measuring and being photographed naked, a pseudo-scientific study to explain perceived Sami inferiority.
Despite the negative environment, Elle Marja is curious and excited to learn, and excels, mastering the Swedish language and her other lessons. At the end of her short education, when she is expected to return home, Elle Marja wants to keep on learning but is made to understand that her racial inferiority means that serious achievement and advanced learning are not expected of or available to her. Ashamed of her heritage, and frustrated with these restrictions, she decides she has to escape, not just the school, but also her Indigenous life, and she sets about to “become Swedish”. When she meets a handsome man at a dance that she attends in disguise (without her traditional Sami garb), she makes a connection that transforms her escape fantasy into a potential reality. Renaming herself Christina, and abandoning her younger sister, she walks away from the school and her Sami identity and into the unknown.
The film opens and closes in the present life of the older woman, but mainly lives in her painful past. This is about grief, about guilt, about the toll taken on a life rejecting one’s origins to satisfy the majority’s unjust discrimination. It has been described as provocative, uncomfortable, infuriating and inspiring.
Newcomer Lene Cecilia Sparrok, a teenage Sami reindeer herder in real life, plays Elle Marja brilliantly. It is a devastating performance where she embodies the survival instincts and self-loathing of a girl who has internalized the prejudice surrounding her. She is completely credible and powerfully moving.
Sami Blood is rated 14A and shows at 5 p.m. on Saturday, March 31 at the Salmar Classic.