DEFINITION X THE FLINT
THERE’S A SAYING IN THE INDIGENOUS FILM COMMUNITY: NOTHING ABOUT US WITHOUT US The Flint’s Neal Romanek sits down with Anne Lajla Utsi, managing director of the International Sami Film Institute, to discuss the institute’s mission and the importance of indigenous storytelling in today’s world
The Flint: Let’s start at the beginning. How did the Sami Film Institute come about? Anne Lajla Utsi: We were a group of young Sami people who had gone to film school, and we had tried to fund our film projects through national film institutes in the Nordic countries. In the early 2000s, that was quite impossible. We eventually established the International Sami Film
Institute (ISFI) in 2009 and got €152,000 from Norway’s Ministry of Culture. That was our starting point – we were really happy about that. Then we thought, “Okay, we have a film institute. So, what do we do now?” I called Nils Gaup, who directed the first-ever Sami feature film, Pathfinder , in 1987. He was a great inspiration for all of us coming after
him taking film education and going into film. In the early years, we focused on capacity building: scriptwriting, directors’ and producers’ labs and courses. There weren’t many Sami filmmakers at that time besides Nils and a few others. So those first years were spent nurturing a new generation, supporting them with what little money we had.
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