Saw this at the Leeuwarden (NL) film festival 2023. Of course, we miss lots of background information on the issues that are at stake here, and what already had happened to arrive at the situation portrayed in the story at hand. However, I had no issue understanding it and connecting the dots. The main ingredients can be inferred on-the-fly, drawing analogies from similar controverses in other countries where minorities are ignored or pestered. Well-known discriminating factors are race and religion, but any other criterium to label people can do. Plenty of analogies will help understanding what is going on here, including what people do to hide their identity to help their career.
At center stage in this movie we meet Ester, her immediate family and several relatives farther away in line, most of them being a mixture of Norwegian and Sami in several grades. Ester does not really want to know she has Sami blood and tries to hide it were possible. Others emphasize in their clothes which side they are on, especially now when a crucial decision is to be made (or rather, already has been made) in parliament about a big dam development that is bound to wipe original Sami grounds clean, in favor of electricity for the general population who does not care about historical grounds.
Still, many things are left unexplained. The most important one is the derelict shed that we see in the opening scene, obviously something dramatic happening there but details are dearly missed. The same shed returns several times later, without getting a clue on what it is all about and why it seems so important.
Nevertheless, in spite of minor unclarities, the movie presents a clear overview of how opinions can be formed and changed. Most people don't care about minorities, wanting them to be kept out of sight, or at best find them a nuisance, or a stumbling block preventing progress for everyone else. It makes you think how we ourselves would act in similar circumstances, how we would balance our own interests against a minority who stand for their interests. Think NIMBY and variations thereof.
All in all, the main purpose of how politics should work in our form of government, is to protect minorities from harmful intentions of the majority. Not always is survival of the fittest the best strategy to arrive at a livable society. A balancing of interest is needed instead. We see it work and not work in this movie. I scored a 4 out of 5 for the audience award when leaving the theater.
