Coincidentally, three things I've watched in recent weeks share a theme: indigenous peoples.

In the case of Midnight Sun, a French-Swedish collaboration, it's the Sami people, whose homeland (Sapmi) covers a tract of land that includes bits of Norway, Finland, and Russia, as well as Sweden. Theirs is the usual sad story of colonialism. In the 19th century they were subject to restrictions on their language and culture; they still endure denigration and discrimination; and when their traditional way of life clashes with "development" imperatives (in the shape of mining and logging), they often come off worst.

Unsurprisingly, the way the series portrays the Sami has drawn mixed reactions.

Some feel the depiction is at best simplistic and at worst inaccurate, cementing stereotypes rather than exploding them.

Others, conversely, feel proud that their culture is at last reaching a broader audience. Maxida Marak, a Sami singer and activist, who acts in Midnight Sun, is grateful to the series "for having given the Sami people a real-world authenticity and shedding their folklore aura".

Sofia Jannok, another Sami singer/activist, who plays a shaman in this drama, feels the project "brings issues to the surface that aren’t talked about ever, like the racism against Sami people. People started to debate these issues, both in Sami communities and in Sweden. That’s a bonus..."

Many Sami have positive roles in the drama -- as activists, shamans, poets, or simply professionals doing a good job. But the only Sami character that's portrayed in any depth is the half-Sami policeman. The key villain, who is exceptionally cruel and cunning, is also Sami, and although his motives are personal rather than political, I guess you have to wonder whether that storyline will help the indigenous cause. Then again, it would be nonsensical to always depict minorities as "goodies"... 

The other interesting thing about this series is the town where a lot of the action is set. Kiruna is dominated by its gargantuan iron ore mine -- to such an extent that the town needs to "move" to accommodate the mine's continued activity.

The word "move" owes its inverted commas to the ambivalent nature of the undertaking. Writing in October last year, Jennie Sjoholm puts it like this:

"What will happen in Kiruna in the future is at this point speculative -- how long will there be iron ore enough for mining to continue, whether enough of the town’s identity will be preserved, or if it will develop into a fly-in fly-out settlement? What is clear is that the ‘town move’ is a useful concept precisely because of its ambiguity. It opens itself up to interpretation, allowing a range of fantastical conclusions to be drawn. To say that Kiruna is being demolished would signal something completely different -- even if it were just as true that much has been or will be torn down. Just as there is a risk that the nuances of this transition will be lost in the face of the mine’s inevitable advancement, there is a risk that many dimensions of Kiruna’s history will be lost in the urban transformation. Heritage values tend to shift over time, but once a building, or a neighbourhood, is demolished, or a different history is forgotten or covered over, so is the tangible recollection of the past."

Aside from the somewhat scary pictures of the mine, the photography in this series is enormously evocative, depicting a superb landscape that I would even brave the cold to explore.


We didn't take the camera on our trip to Sweden in 1996. (I know... We were so slack in those days...) The best I can do is the Balestrand area of Norway, in 1992







Otherwise, what of the actual plot? Well, truly, every Scandi noir I watch seems to be a little more lurid and gruesome than the last...

And here is an interesting question: Is it a crime drama if pretty much EVERYONE dies...? The crime-busting team (a half-Sami Swede and a French woman of Berber origin) fails to prevent substantial loss of life, leaving the penner of the question to speculate that the central focus actually isn't crime per se, but rather multiculturalism and the dysfunctional nature of the investigating duo's families.

The crime drama genre has certainly developed in interesting directions...

Once you're sensitized to a topic, additional interesting things start to turn up on your radar screen. Just the other week, I came across this piece by Harry Hobbs on the Samediggi, the indigenous parliament -- opened in August 1993 in Kiruna -- that is supposed to represent Sami voices in Sweden. The 31 members of its plenary are elected by Sami who identify as such, and who also fulfil certain language-related criteria. It was hailed as a milestone in Sami self-determination. But of course it left many problems unsolved. Its "conflicted legal position" means it often struggles to give voice to Sami interests (which are in any case differentiated rather than monolithic), and it can find itself being ignored by the Swedish state. Most egregiously, Sami have little opportunity to influence decisions on mining or the exploitation of forest land.

Hobbs's article explored whether the Samediggi could be a model for indigenous representation in Australia. And another screen piece we saw recently underlines, in case we still need to be convinced, why such an initiative might be needed.

Charlie's Country -- directed by Rolf de Heer, released in 2013, and towered over by David Gulpilil, who plays the central character and also co-wrote the script with de Heer -- is a very moving film.

It's another piece that tells you nothing that several years' residence in Australia wouldn't already have divulged; nevertheless, it puts the whole massive injustice that's been inflicted worldwide on indigenous people right back up there where it belongs, which is in the forefront of our consciousness.

Charlie is an aging Aboriginal. That Charlie is not his real name we learn from the doctor, who asks permission to call him that, as he has "trouble pronouncing foreign names". Ouch... How long have Aboriginal people been in Australia, again...?

Charlie's world is dominated by white authority. He lives in an Aboriginal township where alcohol is illegal. He's been allocated a shack, but it compares unfavourably with the housing made available to white civil servants. Government handouts emerge from the ATM, and are shared about very liberally among any who happen to be in need at that moment, and Charlie gets the odd job as a tracker (he doesn't worry about running with the hares and hunting with the hounds, so long as both hares and hounds pay up). But money is obviously scarce, and this is impacting his health. In a succession of confrontations with the local police, he is stripped of everything that enables him to hunt food in the bush.

As Tasha Robinson pithily puts it: "There’s a casual disinterest to all these rules and the way they’re enforced. The universally white cops don’t have any particular animus against the Aborigines, and aren’t persecuting them out of racist venom. They’re just complacent, apathetic, and oblivious about the ways their laws -- and the implied puritanical moral codes behind them -- affect people who live grudgingly on the edge of their civilization."

Charlie eventually decides to go back to the bush, but his body can no longer cope with the rigours of that way of life, and he ends up being airlifted to a hospital in Darwin -- the very fate he had seen befall others, and had striven to avoid. Discharging himself, he joins a band of homeless Aborigines, and ends up in prison for supplying them with forbidden alcohol. Once released, he returns to his original home, and (having refused at the beginning of the movie) accedes to a request to teach dance and rituals to Aboriginal youth.

Gulpilil is undeniably a powerful actor. Robinson again: "He often schools his face into a mask-like stillness, as Charlie deliberately hides what he’s feeling from pushy cops or scolding elders. But he’s often most expressive when withholding his feelings. And when Charlie and Pete trade banter, they share a particular 'hey, hey!' laugh that sounds like a community call to celebration; it’s so evocative that the film gets more pain from Charlie falling away from laughter than it would from long speeches or big drama... By simply watching Charlie competently, confidently operating on his own in the verdant, beautifully shot wild spaces outside of town, de Heer gets across everything worth saying about assimilation, and what’s lost when one culture devours another."


Ancient Aboriginal shelters, Victoria, Australia, 2007







I didn't realize this when I watched it, but the film draws substantially on Gulpilil's own life, which was sent in a different direction when he was cast in Walkabout in 1971. He acted with great acclaim in a succession of movies after that, but had an "uneasy" relationship with the industry, and found that his career drove a wedge between him and his own Northern Territory community.

He has had alcohol problems, and served some time in gaol for assault. Indeed, it was a prison visit by De Heer that sowed the seed for Charlie's Country, which became -- as Gulpilil recognizes -- his "life story".   

Gulpilil was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2017, at which point he was estimated to have six months left to live. He's still defying the odds. Go Gulpilil...

Lastly, we watched Aruanas, a Brazilian TV series that follows the trials and triumphs of an environmental NGO working in the Amazon rainforest.

Katie Burton sums up the goal, the action, and the effect pretty well:

"There are compromising dossiers, egocentric businessmen, threatening notes, power-dressing lobbyists, bodies in trunks and frequent brushes with death. In an early scene, set to the thumping back-track of Imagine Dragon’s Believer, the fictional activists shout the names of others who have died defending environmental rights. It sets the tone for what’s to come: a fast-paced, fast-talking drama with a real sense of danger at its heart.

"If it all sounds a bit far-fetched, it’s not. For more than three years Brazil has occupied the world’s number one sport for the most activists killed each year. In 2017, 57 were killed, 80 per cent of them specifically being environmental protestors. The plot of Aruanas is based on the real testimonies of environmental activists and was developed in partnership with over 20 global NGOs including Amnesty International and Greenpeace. In Brazil, somewhat unbelievably, the plot of Aruanas is not an exaggeration."

This was the first Brazilian telenovela we'd seen, so I don't know how typical it is. The pace was indeed fairly frantic, and the soundtrack nothing if not punchy (maybe we're too accustomed to mournful Scandinavian musical backgrounds). It was certainly nice to hear Brazilian Portuguese (the variant which I've played around with for a couple of years, and which left me pretty under-equipped for the Portuguese of Portugal...) And hats off to Globo, a Brazilian TV network, for its extraordinarily comprehensive show site. Seriously, you can find out EVERYTHING about the series here -- from the choice of costumes through analysis of the plotline to the impact the show had on the actors' own environmental consciousness. 

Anna Jean Kaiser notes that Brazil's telenovelas have quite a track record when it comes to presenting and discussing societal problems and changing mores, and have for a long time pushed the boundaries: "Under strict censorship during the 1964 to 1985 military dictatorship, telenovelas used metaphors and parallels to rouse public criticism of the regime. More recently, novelas have featured gay relationships and transgender characters."

Aruanas, too, as the UN Environment Programme testifies, "is a creative attempt to reach millions of consumers of entertainment content who are currently disengaged from the crisis facing the Amazon and many other ecologically vulnerable parts of our planet."

The central conflict is a classic one. As one of the mining company representatives expresses it: "The only people who like the rainforest are indigenous people and celebrities. The masses like money -- and there will be plenty here."

Writing in 2019, Kaiser records the current Brazilian president's "unprecedented attack on environmental protections". Deforestation was up dramatically on the previous year; new pesticides had been granted approval; and the government was reportedly planning to allow mining in indigenous reserves -- precisely the plot featured in Aruanas.


Brazil is an aspiration for us, rather than a memory. But these photos are from Kalimantan Timur, Indonesia, 2014, and portray an area that also struggles with issues of the environment and indigenous rights









Working alongside Globo on the production of the series was Maria Farinha Films, a company that prides itself on its ethics -- recycling or reusing costumes, and ensuring the participation of women (47% of the crew were female), and local people (131 bit-part actors and 2,000 extras and background actors were employed, over 30% of them living in the Amazonian rainforest region).

Abraao Mazuruna (who plays Raoni, one of the members of the indigenous group caught up in the mining conflict) testifies: "I was born in village 31, on the Solimões River. As a child, I lived in reality what my character lived in fiction. I don't remember enough, but I saw an attack by loggers invading our lands. Everything came back to me as if it were real now in the present in Aruanas... Many years ago, we didn't have opportunities like we have now. In my ethnicity, Matses, I am the first actor to emerge. It is important to represent indigenous people nationally to show that we also have the ability to show our people, to be independent, to act, to do whatever we want." The series also features lines from the Matse language, which Abraao helped to translate from Portuguese.

Kay Sara (who plays Payall, from the same ethnic group) also underlines the importance of media representation: "When people see themselves on TV, in the cinema or in advertising, they feel included in the environment in which they live. In my whole life, and going back much earlier, all the films were always made by non-indigenous people. Our references are these. When other kinds of people, mixed-race people, appear, you start to see that you can work with that too. You end up becoming a person who exists within society."

So, while not eschewing the classic staples of the drama series (adultery, passion, fashion, and violence), and not always successfully steering clear of the indigenous-victim/outside-saviour trope, Aruanas at least makes a solid attempt to make indigenous people more visible.

Which -- when you read that less than 1% of Australia's water rights are held by its indigenous people, or that American Indians and Alaska Natives are dying of covid not only at much higher rates but also at younger ages than other groups -- is presumably a step in the right direction.