Before her kids leave home, a migrant mother shows them footage she shot during a school year they lived in her native Finland and starts a conversation about childhood and motherhood, growing up and letting go.

“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 home country. Can a year together in Finland be enough for her kids to grow roots in their second homeland?

When Mari met her husband Leo at 27, she felt that she had found a place to settle in Amsterdam with him. “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 the Sacred Mountain in Finland.

Fourteen years ago, Mari's dream came true. She, Leo and their two kids Ilari (10) and Sanna (12) moved for one school year to Northern Finland. Sanna and Ilari were both born and raised in Amsterdam and feel at home in Dutch culture and city life. Life in a little village near the wilderness is completely different from anything they had ever experienced. But perhaps strangest of all for them is that the kids in their new school do not know about Britney Spears.

Six years after their experiment on the Sacred Mountain, Mari starts a conversation between her and her kids. Has her ambition to share her culture and Finnish identity been successful? Were her children able to grow roots in Finland? Looking back as teenagers, Ilari (16) and Sanna (18) do not seem to share their mother’s nostalgia about their time on the Sacred Mountain.

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

But in reality, this dreamlike year is not quite the same as Mari’s own childhood. “Scary things” happened to Mari as a child. Her parents gave her an immense amount of freedom. The kind of freedom that many Finnish kids enjoy yet Dutch kids can only dream of.

Ten years after their time in Finland, Mari interviews Ilari (21) and Sanna (23) again. They are now students and seem more connected to the Sacred Mountain than their teenage selves. They both declare that they felt more at home in Finland. “At home in a different way.”

“Why do you make films about your family?” Ilari and Sanna finally get to ask their mother. Mari admits, she probably could have anticipated that question that she already asked herself a million times. Maybe it is a way to investigate life by drawing stories from her own family or a way to create a narrative for her own life that did not go according to her own plans. Or perhaps, it is a way to hold on to a dream that became reality for a brief moment in the past.

But now with her kids growing up to be independent adults who are creating the narratives of their own lives, Mari realizes, it is time to let go and move on. Let go of their kids’ childhood as well as her own. As there are many new things to explore in the present and in the future.

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 (Sacred Mountain). Now, she is working on The Glass Ceiling (the working title).

Genre: Creative documentary
Spoken languages: Finnish, Dutch
Duration: 90 min

Director / Producer / DOP: Mari Soppela
Composer / Sound designer: Leo Anemaet
Creative producer: Cornelis Kasander
Editors: Giles Gardner, Mari Soppela
Color grader: Laurent Fluttert
Production company: LPMA Productions & Recordings

Production stage: In post-production
Planned premiere: Autumn 2020

Founded in 2000, LPMA Recordings is a creative studio run by Dutch composer Leo Anemaet and Finnish filmmaker Mari Soppela. Based in Amsterdam, they produce music and sound composition, and cross media design. LPMA Productions is their Finnish film branch, founded in 2006 in Northern Finland, which develops and produces creative documentaries.

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).