“Brace Your Heart” director Amanda Kernell is ready to talk about forgiveness.
“What can be forgiven? And what if you live in a place where everything has to be, because it can be a matter of survival?,” she wonders.
In Kernell’s new film — unspooling at TIFF and the San Sebastián Film Festival — young Ejva (Elli Sara Valkeapää) is forced to tend to her late father’s reindeer herd. Her family depends on her, but she’s struggling. She accepts help from Heaika (Andte Gaup-Juuso) while falling for his cousin. But it comes at a price.
“How do you free yourself from trauma, both as an individual and as a group, when you’re so dependent on each other? You can leave everything behind, but there must be another option. Even though you might still have to stay with the people who put you through something violent,” says the director.
The film, sold by TrustNordisk, premiered its trailer with Variety here.
Kernell, who has Sámi roots, previously talked about her community in “Sámi Blood.”
“It’s not just some problem I ‘made up’ for my character — it’s something I see in real life. I really want to know what the solution is,” she stresses.
“In reindeer herding, which most of my family on my father’s side does, you have to work together. It’s a matter of life and death. There’s no phone coverage, the ice is thin and the weather changes all the time.”
She adds, “There are many suicides in this world, but there are also people who are surviving and finding the light on the other side.”
She took the title from a saying meant to prepare young Sámi reindeer herders for a difficult future.
“You need to harden your heart in order to survive. Maybe that’s how you get through difficult things, traumas and death — and a life that’s very close to death. But it’s not the path to love,” notes Kernell.
Ejva doesn’t want to do that either: “She can’t allow her heart to harden.”
Kernell says, “In film school [Kernell graduated from the National Film School of Denmark], they used to say: ‘Why did the Gods choose this specific person to go through all this? Because they needed it.’ It sounds brutal, but she needed it — just to find her way up.”
She adds: “This is very nerdy, but in psychology, they say that words can free you. There might be a point to confrontation. When you talk about what you fear the most, something might change inside of you. Your nightmare can go away. It makes me hopeful.”
Kernell wanted to reflect the realities of the reindeer herding, which required a larger scale than she was used to.
“With my cinematographer, Sophia [Olsson], we had to deal with helicopters, snowmobiles and trains. We wondered: ‘We are only interested in emotions, so why are we filming all these snowmobiles?’ But there are places that scream loneliness, and we tried to find them,” she recalls.
“I’ve always admired my cousins, who have been doing this since we were teenagers. According to some statistics, it’s the deadliest profession in Sweden after being an army pilot. I wanted the film to be achingly close to reality. You see a teenager moving reindeer alone on a mountain. It’s not CGI.”
The film made her think about how we define our value through work.
“There’s this fear: What if I lose my ability to work? Who am I then? Many people feel this way,” she points out.
“I hadn’t thought about this before, but when I made [second feature] ‘Charter,’ I had a severe concussion. I couldn’t read, I couldn’t see. Everything was blurry for months. Being a reindeer herder who can’t work properly must be like being a director who can’t see. Fortunately, I can do it again.”
Leave a Reply