With all due respect to, and due excitement about, the flow of first-name-basis Hollywood celebs passing through our town in the next week and a half courtesy of the Santa Barbara International Film Festival (SBIFF) — Denzel, Jeff (“the Dude”), Ryan, Emma, Isabelle, Casey, Michelle — some of the most substantial material in the festival will hail from and expose us to life beyond U.S. borders … make that our suddenly inflamed and irradiated borders. It was ever thus at SBIFF, which wears both its Oscar-season Hollywood harvest and its international cinema integrity proudly, and maybe all the more this year, just at a time when xenophobia and other dangerous energies have invaded the White House.
That said, of a dozen films I screened before opening night of the festival, a handful stood out as special and noteworthy of seeking out, not only on grounds of filmic originality or dramatic powers, but also for their ability to transport our American-centric sensibilities to other lands and outlooks. Movie passes become valuable travel documents, with no need for hang-ups or lawyers in airports.
This year, one of those designated “exotic” locations is Scandinavia, via a special Nordic Cinema sidebar, bringing to the forefront a strong, if small-ish, cinematic culture we’ve seen in limited doses in the past festivals. The complexity of intercultural relations between Sweden and Lappland (a k a its more accurate and politically correct name, Samiland) — which stretches across the top of Norway, Sweden, and Finland and is home to what has been called the world’s last remaining “white” indigenous people — is key in a sensitive way in the fascinating film Sami Blood. Director Amanda Kernell’s stylistically magnetic and introspective tale deals with a young Sami woman’s indoctrination and alienation from her native heritage, lured into the presumed “civility” of Swedish life. The choice to use the unique chanting Sami “joiks” in the soundtrack and the rugged landscape of the northern, reindeer-herding terrain add to the film’s poignancy and sense of identity lost.