‘An Impossible Task’: Finland’s Katja Gauriloff on Making ‘Je’vida,’ the First Skolt Sámi-Language Film

variety.com:

Christopher Vourlias Finnish director Katja Gauriloff won the top prize this week at the Finnish Film Affair’s showcase of fiction works in progress for “Je’vida,” an intimate historical drama that is the first film ever shot in the Skolt Sámi language.

The film centers on Iida, an elderly Skolt Sámi woman who finds herself in the process of selling her family’s old house and land while keeping her cultural heritage secret from her niece.

It’s the story of a woman who has abandoned her past under the pressures of assimilation, weaving across three different historical eras to examine the fate of Finland’s Indigenous peoples in the post-war period. “Je’vida” is a deeply personal journey for Gauriloff, a Skolt Sámi filmmaker who has spent her life reckoning with the group’s struggle for survival since World War II, when most of their ancestral homeland was lost to Russia. “All the people were evacuated to [modern-day] Finland,” said the director, whose mother was born in Skolt Sámi native territory in 1942. “We lost our lands.

We lost our identity. So I wanted to make a film about that.” Accomplishing that was something she long believed to be “an impossible task.” The Skolt Sámi are part of the larger Sámi Indigenous group found across Norway, Sweden and Finland.