In the current age of big-budget Marvel films, Avatars, and Disney CGI-fest remakes, we are conditioned to think the bigger, the better. More CGI must mean a better movie. But if you use both sides of your brain, you’ll know this couldn’t be further from the truth. Co-writer/director Katja Gauriloff’s film Je’vida captures everything on camera and provides a taste of clean water in the film age of Coca-Cola.
After her sister dies, Lida (Sanna-Kaisa Palo) returns to her childhood home with her niece Sanna (Seidi Haarla). As part of the sister’s estate sale, they begin to clear out the house. Sanna yearns to learn of her mother’s past, but Lida coldly ignores her as she is visibly shaken by being there. As Lida begins burning photographs and mementos, the audience is taken into her memories as a child growing up in an isolated cabin with her mother, sister, and grandparents in post-Russo-Finnish war Finland.
“…puts her grandmother in a nursing home, and leaves for a happy life.”
Lida, whose birthname is Je’vida, is part of the small Skolt Sámi community. There are approximately 300 today. Je’vida’s simple life is forever changed as she goes from spending her days among her close-knit family and community to being forced to enter a boarding school. What should be a positive experience becomes a traumatic experience of cultural assimilation. Je’vida runs away from the boarding school and returns to her home, where she remains until her mother dies during childbirth.
Je’vida then jumps in time to Je’vida, now a young woman, going by Lida, signifying her complete assimilation into the modern age. She meets an engineer, whom she plans to move south to marry, puts her grandmother (Matleena Fofonoff) in a nursing home, and leaves for a happy life. Returning to the present day, it is clear Lida is anything but happy, though we do not know what resulted in that hopeful trip south. Their desires to remember and forget the past bring Lida and Sanna to the point of catharsis as they are both reminded of what is truly important in life.
"…every frame is gorgeous."
