Brace Your Heart, by director Amanda Kernell, is a quiet exploration of grief, resilience, and community focused on Sámi women in northernmost Europe. The movie follows Ejva (Elli Sara Valkeapää), who inherits her father’s herd of reindeer after he dies unexpectedly and is forced to balance her grief with her duty and the needs of her family. Stop me if you’ve heard this story before, or at least the broad strokes of it.
That’s part of the magic of Brace Your Heart, the way it manages to tell what feels like a very universal story: grief is something we all recognize, and the pressures put on young women are also very familiar to so many of us. Ejva is facing all of those; what changes for us are the circumstances around her.
Even those are very interesting, from the perspective of someone who knew very little about Sámi culture before this movie and who went on a spiral after watching it. Entertainment is often a gateway to knowledge when it does a good job, and Brace Your Heart left me not just empathizing with one particular character, but curious about understanding a different way of life. That’s a win.
But the movie is as much about Ejva trying to find where she belongs, even if she has to make that space for herself, as it is about the ways in which community can harm and uplift us, depending on the circumstances. We see Ejva make the calculated decision to date Heaika (Andte Gaup-Juuso), not because she wants to, but because it’s what’s expected of her and will make her life easier. And later, we see what that costs her, and how she and the people around her react as she is finally open about what happened to her.
But Ejva isn’t a victim, and the movie is less a criticism of the power imbalance inherent to the system, as it is an exploration of the Sámi community and what it takes for a young woman to be, if not respected, at least allowed to earn her place. Perhaps there’s criticism to be made, and the movie never suggests the system is fair. But it’s also not as interested in the big picture as it is in Ejva’s story, and within the context of the movie, it works.
There is also a sweet little romance between her and Nejla (Vincent Niia) that manages to give us something other than the horrible images of a woman having to be with a man she doesn’t want to be with and put up with however he wants to behave because that’s the only way she can continue to do what she loves. It’s certainly not the most engaging part of the movie, but it’s a good way to ground the story in not just the bad and give us a little bit of hope to go on.
Set and shot in Sápmi (formerly known as Lapland), Brace Your Heart is a visually striking story that relies heavily on Valkeapää’s acting. When you have a character who says as little as Ejva does, you need a capable performer who can tell the story without words. Valkeapää excels at this, and that, alongside the majestic scenery and a powerful score by Rebekka Karijord and Kristian Eidnes Anderson, make for a very emotional tale, set in a place that normally doesn’t get to showcase its highs and lows.
The beauty of film festivals is that you sometimes end up immersed in a story that perhaps, outside of the confines of a festival, you might not have had a chance to check out. Brace Your Heart was that for me, and it was perhaps one of the most surprising and enjoyable ones. If you’re looking to know more about the Sámi or just to be touched by the way, even within the differences, the human experience is so similar, this is the movie for you.
Brace Your Heart screened at the Toronto International Film Festival.
