Sámi voices are being given a significant elevation at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival, with acclaimed documentarians Suvi West and Anssi Kömi’s quietly powerful indigenous repatriation non-fiction feature Homecoming (Máhccan) leading a trio of Sámi films at the festival for the first time ever.
Homecoming (Máhccan), premiering as part of the prestigious TIFF docs section, joins fiction features Sara Margrethe Oskal’s The Tundra Within Me from Norway and Katja Gauriloff’s Je’vida from Finland.
For Sámi director Suvi West, who co-directed Homecoming (Máhccan) with partner Anssi Kömi, she sees the significance in such representation on screen at the festival, not just for the Sámi people, but female voices.
Homecoming (Máhccan) shares a personal story about the return of Sámi artifacts, long held in museums, to their homeland. Its World premiere screening is slated for Friday, September 8th at 4:15 p.m. EST at Toronto’s Scotiabank Theatre. A 2nd screening will be held on Saturday, September 9th, at 9:15 p.m. at Scotiabank.
Synopsis
The film is set in the museum world at a turning point, where the national museums have to deal with their colonialistic history. The National Museum of Finland returned thousands of everyday objects taken from the indigenous Sámi people back to them.
Filmmaker Suvi West (Along with co-director Anssi Kömi) takes the audience behind the scenes of the museum world, revealing a visual, philosophical, and spiritual realm. She seeks a connection with ancestors through old museum objects, eventually arriving at the collective pain points of the Sámi people. How can the damage caused by outsiders be repaired so that collective pains can be left behind?
Homecoming (Máhccan) is a Finnish/Norwegian co-production produced by Janne Niskala of Vaski Filmi (Finland) in association with Mette Cheng Munthe-Kaas and Johanna Dorothea Raita of Ten Thousand Images (Norway).
Screening Times:
Public 09/08/2023 4:15PM Scotiabank 11
Press & Industry 09/09/2023 3:05 p.m. Scotiabank 8
Public 09/09/2023 9:15PM Scotiabank 13
Press & Industry 09/13/2023 9:10 a.m. Scotiabank 5
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