Pathfinder (1987)
The sole survivor of a family massacre saves his entire tribe in the first ever film depicting the Sámi people
7.0
Movie
Norway
Northern Sami
Adventure
1987
NILS GAUP
Helgi Skúlason, Ingvald Guttorm, John Sigurd Kristensen
86 min
TLDR
It’s actually funny how the stunt doubles, not the cast, complained about the cold to the point they refused to work.
What it's about
Finnmark, around 1000 AD. After witnessing the brutal murder of his family by a rival tribe, a young Sámi man named Aigin flees to the nearby village and makes a plan to save the entire tribe.
The take
When forming a nation, governments would like to view the entire populace as one people– for example, the Norwegians live in Norway. But plenty of these nations have smaller populations of different ethnicities, some that have been on the land far longer than the nation itself. Pathfinder is the first ever feature film depicting the Sámi people, depicting one of their tales. The film plays out like a familiar folk adventure, where a boy comes of age through clever thinking, but it also mirrors their struggle to keep their culture from Norwegianization, to protect their people from extinction. Pathfinder may not have the best special effects, but there’s a beauty in the way writer-director Nils Gaup depicts his home county of Finnmark, and the way he depicts his people’s past.
What stands out
For some reason, out of all the scenes here, the bear fight is the one that stood out to me the most. Don’t get me wrong– it feels like the shot was possible due to a person wearing a fairly realistic bear costume– but there’s something about it that feels less eerie than having a CGI bear.
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