Amanda Kernell again explores Sámi culture in her third feature Brace Your Heart, which premieres in the Oscar‑qualifying Platform section.
Amanda Kernell had to ask herself an unusual question when shooting her film Brace Your Heart: “How can you create emotional images of someone riding a snowmobile?” Her solution: “Making fiction is all about filming how something feels rather than about how it is or how it was.”
Kernell’s third feature is certainly not trying to emulate Fast & Furious-style snowmobile sequences — instead it is a character-driven, emotional story of Ejva, a young Sámi woman who inherits her late father’s reindeer herd, and has to prove her place in the male-dominated community while moving past trauma. “I wanted to explore if you are put through a trauma, how do you find your way out on the other side?” says the writer/director. “There is forgiveness, confrontation or leaving. But then there must be a fourth way.”
A key challenge was balancing the emotional drive of the film with the reality of life in the northern climates of Sápmi (previously known as Lapland). “If you make a mistake here, you might die,” says Kernell. “The ice is thin, the winter is cold, you’re far from everything… For me, it’s like a Greek stage — this circular arena in winter where you separate the reindeer, and they can all see you, you’re exposed to everyone.”
Forgiving nature
Modern reindeer herding involves snowmobiles, and even helicopters, but Brace Your Heart also shows some of the traditional Sámi values and customs still in practice. “Like every film I’ve done, the ideas in this film are partly personal and come from the world that I know,” she says. “But it’s also a choir piece about a lot of young people in reindeer herding. What interested me was, what if you live in a place where everything must be forgiven? How do we move on as a group and as an individual?”
The film posed several challenges — Kernell describes it as “the most difficult project I’ve ever done” — with 18 main roles, many of them cast with non-professionals, crowd scenes featuring up to 50 people and, of course, reindeer. “Those are real reindeer and real reindeer herders. That was important so the audience could feel the physicality of being there,” says Kernell, whose paternal lineage includes Sámi reindeer herders although she has never been one herself. Kernell was also inspired by her Sámi grandmother’s upbringing for 2016 award-winning debut feature Sami Blood.
Brace Your Heart will meet its first audience in Toronto’s Platform section before heading to San Sebastian’s main competition. The film was shortlisted, but not selected, as Sweden’s international feature Oscar submission; however, it still has a chance to qualify through a new rule introduced by Ampas that allows six festival-winning films to enter — Platform being one of them. Eva Akergren produces for Nordisk and the film is a co-production between Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Iceland and Bulgaria; TrustNordisk handles sales.
Casting search
Kernell started scouting three years ahead of production to find her largely non-professional cast. When she eventually found the actors she wanted, she accommodated them by moving the film’s locations and changing the language to North Sámi, which differs from the South Sámi spoken by Kernell’s family.
She met her future lead actress Elli Sara Valkeapää when she was only 18 years old, and the director says, “I instantly felt she could do this.” Valkeapää, who comes from a
reindeer herding family and also works in a Sámi preschool, took some convincing. It was Kernell’s own heritage that helped convince Valkeapää and the other non-professional actors that she knew about their world.
The production schedule was adjusted along the way to capture the seasonal rhythms of reindeer herding — if they needed a scene of reindeer calf marking, they simply had to wait until the Sámi people were doing it. “You don’t know when that will happen until about 24 hours beforehand,” says Kernell. “We had our team on hold for nearly four weeks, waiting.”
She worked again with DoP Sophia Olsson, who shot Sami Blood and second feature Charter (2020). “We wanted it to be close to reality and not romanticised,” says the filmmaker. “You’re physically with Ejva in the middle of it, you’re not a bystander. Sophia is great at putting you in the same breath as Ejva.”
Surprisingly, reindeer can be good scene partners too, reports Kernell. “Some of them are really good at hitting marks. As long as you put food in the right place.”
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