In the current age of big-budget Marvel films, Avatars, and Disney CGI-fest remakes, we are conditioned to think the bigger, the better, the more CGI, the better, but if you use both sides of your brain, you’ll know this couldn’t be further from the truth. 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 her passing sister’s estate sale, they begin to clear out the house. Sanna yearns to learn of her mother’s and her family’s past, but Lida coldly ignores her as she is visibly shaken by being there herself. 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.

“…desires to both remember and forget the past ultimately bring Lida and Sanna to a point of catharsis…”
Lida, whose birthname is Je’vida, is part of the small Skolt Sámi community, of which there are approximately 300 speaking 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, which 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.
The story then jumps in time to Je’vida, now a young woman, going by Lida, signifying her full assimilation into the modern age. Lida 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 both remember and forget the past ultimately bring Lida and Sanna to a point of catharsis as they are both reminded of what is truly important in life.