Marja Helander

Sami dance students Birit and Katja Haarla dance through the villages and lost woods of Sápmi all the way to where the important decisions are made. The polarity of Nature and the Western way of life is filtered through sharp humour.

An exploration of the personal and historical struggles of the Sámi people, navigating imprisonment, protests, and surreal encounters, providing a unique insight into one man's extraordinary journey.

The video shows the artist in Sámi costume bouncing on a trampoline in a snowy landscape. In between bouncing, she drags the trampoline through the snow - an exhausting exercise judging by her heavy puffing. Marja Helander is a descendant of the Ohcejohka (Utsjoki) Sami on her father's side. Many of her works deal with the challenges of straddling two cultures as part-Finn, part-Sámi. In her early series of photographs The Generations, she juxtaposes self-portraits with old family snapshots and archival material from the Finnish Heritage Agency.

Shelter (Suodji) is an adaptation of an old story from Utsjoki, Sápmi, to the present. It is a legend of what the director´s relative, Ovllá-Ivvár Helander, did during the Spanish flu epidemic in 1918 in Utsjoki. Ovllá-Ivvár decided to fool Death and take his fate into his own hands. Today we are facing similar threats. The protagonist of the film is walking in Ovllá-Ivvár´s footsteps. But at the end, who its really who?

Áfruvvá is a Sami sea creature, the ghost of a drowned person. Longing for warmth, she emerges from the sea to a world devoid of humans and experiences humanity through an abandoned museum.

Rovaniemi 50 cent is a small story set in a Nordic shopping mall. In an interior imitating the Ancient Rome, there is almost undetectable reference to the Sámi culture. This clue leads the protagonist to an absurd encounter.