European Films

A scene from Nils Gaup's 'Kautokeino-opprøret' (The Kautokeino Rebellion). Photo (c): NFI.

Norwegian Sami director Nils Gaup, who directed the Oscar-nominated Ofelas (Pathfinder), a Sami revenge story set in 1000 AD, now returns with a film closer to home and his own family history with Kautokeino-opprøret (The Kautokeino Rebellion). The film recounts the story of the titular rebellion that happened in the mid-nineteenth century in Kautokeino and which was one of the bloodiest episodes in Norwegian and Sami history. The rebellion finally led to the execution of one of Gaup's own forefathers. The snowbound epic was made on a €6.8 million budget and premieres today at the Tromsö Film Festival. It will be released commercially in Norway on Friday.

Kautokeino (Guovdageaidnu in the Sami language; the Norwegian version is a phonetic transcription of the Sami name) is situated in the extreme Northeast of Norway, close the Finnish and Russian border. Its name literally means "halfway" and indicates its importance as a place of trade along a traditional trading route of the Sami people, who in the nineteenth century were subject to Norwegian pressure to assimilate into Norwegian society.

In the winter of 1852 Kautokeino was the stage of a bloody rebellion of the Sami against the Norwegians (one of the few violent clashes between the two groups) that started off with a debt for consumed liquor and finally left several dead, including the Norwegian police chief, a local merchant and some Sami who were executed after the rebellion was finally put down. Two of the Sami leaders were beheaded and buried without their heads after a trial. 

Gaup has been working on the Sami- and Norwegian-language film for over ten years. "Until recently the uprising was a taboo subject among the 1,600 population in Kautokeino; still it has inspired five novels, two operas, one symphony, and several documentaries. But since most families have ancestors who were involved, it was not considered proper tea-time conversation," the Kautokeino-born director explained in an interview.