Ellen-Astri Lundby

In a humorous and insightful way, the film tells about how yoik arises and is created, about how to yoik - and who you can yoik.

An adventure can occur anywhere. Also at the bus stop.

Min Mors Hemmelighet (Suddenly Sami) is a personal film about identity. During the director’s childhood and youth in Oslo her mother never told her about her indigenous Sami background in the Arctic area of Norway. Why didn’t she? And how can the director suddenly become Sami in the middle of life? And does she really want to?

Three people deceive each other in different ways.

A unique legal battle between indigenous peoples unfolds on film: Two Sami groups face each other in court, locked in an insoluble conflict that has its roots in the state's forced displacements over a hundred years ago. How can one agree on a future when the past is lived so differently? Over a hundred years ago, the state forced Northern Sami to move into Southern Sami territory. Today, their descendants are fighting in court for land, reindeer herding, and the right to be Sami. The film shows how state actions continue to divide a people, and how the past continues to shape their future.

Ellen-Astri Lundby's haunting documentary traces the stories of six elders in Norway who grew up under the weight of World War II. Reconciling the horrors of the past with the present, the elders recount their time as young people as they describe the reality of their childhoods. During the country's fall in 1944, more than 50,000 civilians were deported to the south, and another 20,000 more forced to flee their homes, becoming refugees in the same country they called home. In the present day, the film follows the survivors as they meet with refugees, also children, from Syria and Sudan. Both groups carry similar memories of war, hardship and impossible horrors, and both the elders and audiences are presented with the same question--how will the wartime memories of today's refugee children affect them as adults?