Remember the North American box office dark horse "Escape from Desperate Town" at the beginning of the year?
It was director Jordan Peele's debut, a small-budget production that cost only $4.5 million, but stayed on the North American Top 10 list for eight consecutive weeks, eventually grossing $160 million, and the film also made him the first black director to break the 100 million yuan in his debut.
"Escape from Desperate Town" is a suspense thriller, its every frame of the shot is hidden mystery, the plot is not slow step by step, and finally cleverly presents the theme of racial prejudice.
In fact, racial prejudice is not only reflected in people with different skin colors, and even many people with the same skin color also bear the discriminatory eyes of others because of different races, and the movie I want to talk about today is about this heavy theme.
Blood of Sami
This is a film from Sweden, with the cold wind characteristic of Nordic cinema, the cold color of the whole film, but also especially suitable for the heavy theme conveyed by the film. This new film is relatively unpopular, currently only rated by 244 people, and the editor did not hesitate to give five-star praise.
Directed by Swedish female director Amanda Knell, Sami's Blood was also her first feature film, earning her the Grand Jury Prize in the main competition section of the Tokyo Film Festival.
Lynn Cecilia Sbelk, the actress born in 1997, also won Best Actress in the main competition section.
The film tells the story of the growth of Ella Maya, a little girl of the Sami ethnic group.
I believe that many people are very unfamiliar with the Sami. The Sami people, who live in kiruna, a city in northern Sweden located in the Arctic Circle, have survived for tens of thousands of years and are known as the "last indigenous people" of Europe.
The Sami are a minority of Sweden that raise reindeer for a living, and although they have their own long history and unique language and culture, the Sami are discriminated against in the eyes of orthodox Swedes.
For a time, countries such as Sweden and Norway tried to assimilate the Sámi by forcing them to receive education, and the official ban on the use of Sámi in schools and public places was also the background to the story in the film.
The little girl, Ella Maya, lives with her sister in a boarding school, and unlike her sister, Ella Maya does not seem to identify with her Sami identity.
Christina, the school's female teacher, was an orthodox Swedish woman who was gentle and beautiful in the eyes of Ella Maya and behaved gracefully, so she became the object of Ella Maya's imitation.
Ella had excellent grades, so she was selected as a student representative and welcomed the big names of her superiors to visit the school.
Just as Ella was overjoyed, she discovered that these so-called big men had only come to observe the children of the Sami tribe, taking pictures and measuring the width of the skull with calipers.
Even as with animals, they were brutally ordered to undress and observe their bodies. This made the sensitive Ella feel insulted.
Amid the discrimination of others, Ella wants to leave her hometown to study in the city, and when she begs her female teacher Christina to help her write a letter of recommendation, the authentic female teacher does not hesitate to refuse, on the grounds that "your brains do not have the basic structures required by urban people."
Stubbornly, Ella decided to step on the train and leave the country, she stole a Swedish woman's skirt, burned her traditional Sami costumes, and began to change herself.
It wasn't easy to integrate into another race, and although she changed her name and clothes and met a Swedish boy, Nicholas, at the ball, her Sami-specific physical characteristics made her encounter many strange eyes.
The way people treated her was not friendly, and the bad boys watched and bullied her, and even cruelly cut off one of her ears, just as the Sami people cut off a small ear of a reindeer to swear ownership of the reindeer.
This act is actually a symbol of the self-righteous higher animals, the naked discrimination against what they consider to be inferior groups.
The lesson of blood did not flinch Ella, but strengthened her confidence in wanting to integrate into the mainstream. The film doesn't describe her adult life much, but when Ella grows old and returns to her hometown for attending her sister's funeral, she truly becomes the elegant female teacher Christina with a pearl necklace.
At first, she still had a stubborn rejection of her hometown, her sideburns were pale, but she still habitually pulled her hair around her ears to cover up the humiliating wounds on her ears.
At the end of the movie, the elderly Ella struggles to climb the hill and look at her former hometown, at this time, her heart seems to have suddenly let go of the discipline of the body in order to become a "higher race", and in the fog, Ella finally found the dignity of the upright body.
The ending of the film is long and mysterious, but it tells the story of the ruthless crushing of one civilization on another. Ella said to her dead sister, "Please forgive me," but for her people, perhaps Ella's "betrayal" would never be forgiven.
Fleeing, in today's cities, many people are also fleeing. They are far away from their hometowns and try to integrate themselves into the life of the first-tier big cities, and they would rather fight against the high housing prices and high cost of living in the big cities, and strive to live, rather than return to their hometowns to live a so-called stable life.
It is difficult to distinguish between wrong and right, born as a human being, inherently unequal, economic and culturally determined class is not easy to change, fleeing from home and fleeing the original class, to bear the pain of "betrayal" and blood.
Everyone yearns for a better life, not only for themselves, but also for future generations, so the "blood of Sami" has also become the price that must be paid for change, and this may be the reason why many people choose to stay in the north, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen.