Film director and migrant mother shows her teenage children footage she shot during a primary school year when they lived in her native Finland. She starts an unusual conversation on camera about their lives - in Amsterdam and on the Sacred Mountain. The consequence is confrontation.

“Does it matter where we are born or where we are brought up? Does the landscape shape who we are?” Film director Mari Soppela believes that her soul is on the Sacred Mountain in Finland. Yet, her children who live in Amsterdam do not feel the same connection to her homeland.

When Mari met her husband Leo at 27, she felt that she had found a place to settle with him in Amsterdam. “It felt like I had been moving all my life. Like a migrating bird. And then I found a place where I could rest.” However, over time, she started having dreams of going back to her home. Back to her native Finland.

Fifteen years ago, Mari's dream came true. She, Leo and their two kids Ilari (10) and Sanna (12) moved to Northern Finland. They lived at the foot of the Sacred Mountain, north of the Arctic Circle. Sanna and Ilari went to a village school and Mari filmed their experiences. Life near the wilderness was exciting and new to the metropolitan kids, but perhaps strangest of all was that the Finnish children in their new school didn't know about Britney Spears.

“It was a dream of mine to share my culture with my kids, a piece of my inner landscape. The Northern Lights, the silence of the polar night. Trees wrapped in blankets of snow. Trips over the frozen lake with my father by snowmobile.”

Five years after their experience, Mari starts an unusual conversation on camera with her children in Amsterdam. Has her wish to share her culture and Finnish identity been successful? Were her children able to grow roots in Finland? Looking back as teenagers, Ilari (15) and Sanna (17) do not seem to share their mother’s nostalgia about their year on the Sacred Mountain. Perhaps with the impatience characteristic of their age, they get irritated by the process and dismiss her questions.

Ten years after their time in Finland, Mari interviews Ilari (20) and Sanna (22) again. They are students and seem more connected to the Sacred Mountain than their teenage selves. They both feel more at home in Finland. “At home, but in a different way."

In 2019, Sanna and Ilari get to interview their mother. "Why do you make films about your family?" Mari admits, she could probably have anticipated that question she already asked herself a million times. Maybe it is a way to investigate life by drawing stories from her family or a way to create a narrative for her own life which didn't go according to her own plans. Or perhaps, it is a way to hold to a dream that is in reality already past.

But now, in 2020, Sanna and Ilari are independent adults who are creating the narratives of their own lives, Mari realizes, it is time to let them go and move on. As there are many new things to explore in the present and in the future. Perhaps a new dream only for her in Finland.

Mari Soppela is an award-winning filmmaker and mixed-media designer. After studying video in Finland and computer graphics in the Netherlands, she gained an MA (Computing in Design) in Middlesex University in 1993. At one point a video artist, at another an interface & interaction designer, she now enjoys making creative documentaries.

Mari’s film career has taken her on an odyssey from suicidal depression in her native Finland (Family Files) through challenging the fear of intimacy (Home Recordings) before going back north to trace the censored history of her German grandfather (Who the Devil Can See in the Dark) and returning to Amsterdam where she let go of a dream (Motherland). Now, she is working on The Glass Ceiling (the working title).

Genre: Creative documentary
Spoken languages: Finnish, Dutch, English
Duration: 79 min

Writer/DP/Director: Mari Soppela
Creative producer: Cornelis Kasander
Associate producer: Julia Ton
Producers: Leo Anemaet Mari Soppela
Editors: Giles Gardner Mari Soppela
Music Composers: Ilari Anemaet Leo Anemaet
Sound designer: Leo Anemaet
Colour grading: Laurent Fluttert
Subtitling: Martin Cleaver
Production companies: Cinatura LPMA Productions

Production stage: In post-production
Planned premiere: First half of 2021

LPMA Productions is an independent film company developing and producing creative documentary. It was set up by filmmaker Mari Soppela and composer Leo Anemaet in 2006 in Finland. LPMA Recordings is their Amsterdam based music and sound studio, founded in 2000.

LPMA's latest successes include the film score of Fiona Tan's arthouse hit Ascent and top TV ratings of Soppela's Who the Devil Can See in the Dark on Yle1 in Finland (493 000).