Let The River Flow – REVIEW

The launch of the Scandinavian Film Festival arrives with Ole Giæver’s historical drama from Norway, Let The River Flow.

Set in summer 1979, a young woman, Ester (newcomer Ella Marie Hætta Isaksen) is a recently graduated schoolteacher drawn to a group of protesters who are attempting to stop the flooding of Indigenous Sámi land.

In a parallel to our disgraceful treatment of Indigenous people, the Sámi people (or Laplanders as they have been offensively dubbed) have become outcasts in their own country. Like many Sámi, Ester is ashamed of her heritage and conceals her ethnicity in order to blend in, to the great consternation of her mother. Her cousin, however, is a proud Sámi man, and he introduces Ester to a group demonstrating against the government’s plan to dam their river to build a hydroelectricity plant.

Through the rising tensions faced by the police attacks against the protesters and private tragedies, Ester rediscovers her Sámi heritage, adopts their distinctive and colorful wardrobe, and plunges back into their culture, knowing her very identity and culture is under challenge.

The director, Ole Giæver, has been a festival favourite with previous films premiering at the Berlinale and the Toronto International Film Festival. As a proud Sámi man, his story of both the discrimination of his people and the proposed destruction of the river in Let The River Flow echoes the Australian experience of our Indigenous population and the rise of the environmental campaign in the late 70s and 80s that stopped the Franklin Dam in Tasmania.

Based on real events, Let The River Flow mirrors the Alta dam protest of 1979 and the outrage that helped expose Norway’s dark history of oppression over its indigenous people as part of its “Norwegianisation” assimilation policy, a turning point in the fight for Sámi rights.

This is not necessarily a political film, in fact it’s really a personal portrait of someone searching for their roots and becoming proud to live as they want.

It’s also a film that brings climate to the forefront. In fact, with life imitating art, lead actress Ella Marie Hætta Isaksen recently protested alongside Greta Thunberg against wind turbines built on reindeer pastures used by Sámi herders.

Director Ole Giæver says he wanted to “talk about our society. It’s a very individualistic time: people are politically engaged, but they don’t always do it together. There was something about the Alta case that I found inspiring: the solidarity of the people who were willing to sacrifice so much. I was also really struck by the impact that this case had on Sámi rights. I knew that if I was going to tell this story, it had to be from the Sámi perspective.”

Let The River Flow is a inspirational film told with grace and sensitivity.

★★★★