Arctic Cinemas and the Documentary Ethos Screening IV: Documentary Images of Sápmi

• Event Date: Saturday, August 29, 2015
• Time: 4:15 pm–5:30 pm (CDT)
• Location: Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum, 600 S. Gregory St., Urbana, IL
• Cost: Free Admission

• Film

Arctic Cinemas and the Documentary Ethos examines documentary cinema as a key to contextualizing environmental, indigenous, political, cultural, sociological and ethnographic understandings of the Arctic. This event is the first major international conference to address the Arctic Documentary tradition.

Wind from the West (Vinden från Väster, Arne Sucksdorff, Sweden, 1942) 17 min.

Swedish documentary filmmaker Arne Sucksdorrf's work challenges the dominance of Voice-of-God realism so prevalent in the post-War era. Sharing aesthetic similarities with UK filmmaker Humphrey Jennings, Sucksdorff's work could be called the first examples of expressionist documentary. Wind from the West, the first of two Sucksdorff films being screened, is a short documentary about the life of a Sami family in the northernmost part of Sweden. Despite its status as a documentary film, Wind from the West contains expressionist elements, foregrounding the subjective nature of documentary cinema. This film, along with other Sucksdorff documentaries, was distributed as a documentary travelogue in American cinemas, in this case by 20th Century Fox.

Shadows over the Snow (Skuggor över Snön, Arne Sucksdorff, Sweden, 1946) 11 min.

This expressionist documentary features the lives and habitats of various animals living in the north of Sweden and role of the hunter in this environment. Unlike most nature documentaries, Suckdorff's film is filled with close-ups of the animals in their environments, and does not anthropomorphize them. Instead, the film focuses on the shared landscape in which hunter and animals live in the snow.

Rebel (Bihttoš, Elle-Maija Tailfeathers, Canada, 2013) 12 min.

Bihttoš is an unconventional documentary that explores the complex relationship between a father and daughter. Through animation, re-enactments, and archival photos, writer/director Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers (of Sámi and Blackfoot heritage) delves into the dissolution of her parents’ mythic love story and how it has colored her perception of love in her adult life.

Jorinda’s Journey (Jorindas Resa/Liselotte Wajstedt /Sweden/Norway/Finland, 2014) 16 min.

Inspired by Ann-Marie Ljungberg's contentious and experimental Swedish novel The Journey to Kautokeino (1998), this captivating film intertwines Japanese Butoh performance practices and Sámi yoik to capture a young woman's journey through a frozen – and often threatening – landscape. The film offers an aesthetically sophisticated counterpoint to media reports that downplay the abuse of young women by Sámi elders in Kautokeino.