Film director Mari Soppela's personal dream came true when she moved with her Dutch husband and their two children to her native Finland. The family lived for a year in Pyhätunturi, the Sacred Mountain. Sanna (12) and Ilari (10) went to a village school, made friends and took root in their second home country. Mari followed them with her video camera for one school year. Then they returned to Amsterdam. A few years later, Mari filmed her children again.

A coming-of-age story of a brother and a sister from Amsterdam. The film follows the siblings for one school year in a village school in Finnish Lapland and how their identities and world views develop afterwards. Filmed over the course of eleven years, A Year on the Sacred Mountain is a documentary film about childhood and growing up, and about the widely-praised Finnish school.

The school of Vuostimo was an educational outpost on the edge of the wilderness. There were 21 pupils, two teachers and a cleaner/cook in the village school. The pupils were divided between two classrooms. Sanna and Ilari sat in the same classroom with children aged from 9-12. The pupils programmed Lego robots, crocheted and learnt that there would be no life on earth without the sun.

Temperatures dropped to –25°C and beyond. Snow whirled as the school taxi transported the kids from village to village. Life for metropolitan Sanna and Ilari was quite normal in North of the Arctic Circle. They mastered the Finnish language and ski slopes, but how deeply are they rooted to their second home country?

For two decades, film director Mari Soppela has been making creative documentaries about her family. A Year On the Sacred Mountain is her fourth film that continues her Finnish saga in the major key.

One of the original motives of the film was to respond to questions that she has had to answer commonly in Amsterdam. That it is not always cold and dark in Finland and even if it were the case it is still possible and even nice to live up there. She wants the viewer to observe how utterly normal life can be in North of the Arctic Circle. Or is it after all?

In her narrative voice-over the director, who has lived half of her life in the Netherlands, reflects on her native country, being an expat and raising children.

Mari Soppela is an award-winning filmmaker and mixed-media designer. After studying videography 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 returning north to trace the censored history of her German grandfather (Who the Devil Can See in the Dark). She has now returned to Amsterdam where she is working on A Year on the Sacred Mountain and Lasikatto - The Invisible Made Visible.

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).

Genre: Documentary (coming-of-age)
Spoken languages: Finnish, Dutch
Duration: 90 min

Director / Producer: Mari Soppela
Composer / Sound designer: Leo Anemaet
Production company: LPMA Productions & Recordings

Production stage: In post-production
Planned premiere: Autumn 2019