"The Gaïru mountains and fjords shine brightly. There are riches that are visible and others hidden beneath the surface. Keep the herd alive and the stone blessed." It is at the heart of Sami culture - a people sometimes considered the last indigenous people of Europe - surrounded by reindeer and pure, harsh and wild landscapes, that Norwegian director Elle Sofe Sara decided to set her first feature film, the unique Árru, presented in the Panorama section of the 76th Berlinale. A film that conveys a harsh and unique voice, paying tribute to ancestral traditions deeply rooted in nature while denouncing the external and internal threats weighing on a community struggling daily for its economic and spiritual survival.

“The land is the answer. They may see this place as a desolate zone, but there are births.” Watching over a vast herd of reindeer whose exploitation barely allows them to survive, the small family made up of Maia (Sara Marielle Gaup Beaska), her teenage daughter Áilin (Ayla Nutti) and her brother Dánel (Simon Issát Marainen) lives under a sword of Damocles: an already approved mining project that threatens to dispossess them of half their grazing land. To avert this catastrophe, which none of her actions has managed to halt, Maia seeks advice from her other brother Lemme (Mikkel Gaup), who lives in Canada where he blocked a similar mining company. But what she had not foreseen is that Lemme would arrive in person, take control of a local protest movement and, above all, awaken an old and painful family history involving Dánel, known to everyone yet buried beneath a heavy omertà…

Patiently developing its pieces (the relationships between the characters) like a game of chess, the screenplay written by the director and Johan Fasting weaves a narrative of confrontation between the collective and the individual, the law of silence and the need to expose predators publicly in order to move forward. A muted clash symbolised by three generations of women and by the legacy of a Sami people under pressure from assimilation policies.

Yet beyond the exploration of a subject that echoes other Indigenous sufferings (notably those of Native Americans), it is above all through its style that the film stands out, as the filmmaker succeeds in her bold wager to integrate, in a wholly organic way, joik ritual chants, traditional dances and even a fascinating dreamlike sequence into a highly realistic narrative. The Sami spirit and cosmology do more than merely hover over this debut feature, which strikes the right note by perfectly conveying the modesty and depth of a people’s existence, resilient within a harsh and visually striking natural environment (a raw, snow-covered landscape captured in all its contrasts by cinematographer Cecilie Semec).

Árru was produced by Norwegian company Stær and co-produced by Garagefilm International (Sweden) and It's Alive Films (Finland). The Yellow Affair handles international sales.