Jeʹvida can trigger every deep childhood memory in you to that level you can’t escape it. It’s a powerful recap. The pulling effect of memories once you touch the land and feel its breath is indescribable. This film is not the one to be explained but experienced. I got immersed in the beautiful frames where Iida (Sanna-Kaisa Palo) and her grandfather (Erkki Gauriloff) led a simple life close to nature by a river. She tagged along after him whatever he did. Fishing, boating, recycling..Iida had never learnt anything harming the little ecosystem around her. Director Katja Gauriloff might not have had a script for Jeʹvida. Such narrow conversations intensify Iida’s silent emotional journey. Iida restricts her niece (Sanna (Seidi Haarla) from her right to know about her mother. The girl is unhappy about her aunt when they both travel to the ancestral home. Within moments of she being by the river and that small house, a magnetic pull connects her with the past lives of her family. Jeʹvida gets it but prefers to ignore it.

Jeʹvida is a monochrome experience. Beautiful frames save its people from normal story telling urgencies. Look at those carefully crafted scenes of little Iida’s poor adaptive skills in the orphanage and school. Eve teasing on her ethnical naivety by her peers and how hard was it to cope with even food. She tries to avert it in her youth being her sophisticated self but her rooted grandma again reminds she is a Sámi woman with rural ways of life and culture. Iida resonates those who walked away from their roots with forced Finnishization. Through papers and photographs, Iida burns the traces of her past with mixed feelings. There are deep wounds in her but Katja Gauriloff doesn’t harbour on any personal notes of Iida to justify her hurry to abandon all she owned in the past. Preservation of culture could be a pain for a thinning community.

Sanna-Kaisa Palo’s weighty expressions in Jeʹvida is outstanding. She imparts that heaviness to the audience. Feel Tuomo Hutri’s cinematography and no other way to put it.