PhilPaine.com

I watched this film in the orig­i­nal Sami lan­guage, with­out any sub­ti­tles, but it was not dif­fi­cult to fol­low. The peri­od is cir­ca 1000 A.D., and the sto­ry por­trays an encounter between the nomadic Sami (Lapps) who had inhab­it­ed the far north of Scan­di­navia since pre­his­toric times and the Chudes, anoth­er peo­ple who were more tech­no­log­i­cal­ly advanced (they had cross­bows). The encounter is seen from the Sami point of view, and all the dia­logue is in Sami, a non-Indo-Euro­pean lan­guage in the Finno-Ugric fam­i­ly. To this day, many Sami con­tin­ue to live an arc­tic life-style of rein­deer herd­ing and hunt­ing. There cus­toms are so sim­i­lar to those of the native peo­ple of North­ern Cana­da that know­ing the lan­guage was unnec­es­sary for me. It was easy enough to guess what was hap­pen­ing and what peo­ple were say­ing. The act­ing is effec­tive, espe­cial­ly that of 15-year-old Mikkel Gaup as the pro­tag­o­nist, a youth who works out a scheme to defeat the invaders and thus earns the posi­tion of shaman. The cin­e­matog­ra­phy is crisply beau­ti­ful. This is basi­cal­ly anoth­er “resis­tance myth” — a bare bones real­is­tic ver­sion of the tale told in fan­tas­tic form in Avatar. The title means “Pathfind­er”.