CHAPTER ONE IMAGINING RACIALIZATION AND WHITENESS THROUGH THE CHILD WHO LINES UP

ELINA

Klaus Härö’s film Elina: As If I Wasn’t There (the literal translation of the Finnish title Näkymätön Elina is “Invisible Elina”) is based on the novel Som om jag inte fanns (As If I Wasn’t There) (1978) by Kerstin Johansson i Backe, and it takes place in the Tornio River valley, two decades later than the novel, in the 1950s. The film opens with shots of a forest and a bog as the voice-over of Elina (Natalie Minnevik), a young girl, talks to her dead father in Finnish/Meänkieli, telling him that she knows he is somewhere in the bog where they used to spend time together. One of the shots shows Elina’s foot stepping into the moss of the bog as it goes down and up again, and soon we see her mother, Marta (Marjaana Maijala), calling for her and telling her not to run in the bog alone. In the following sequence, we find out that Elina has been sick but is healthy enough to go to school now. Joining the new classroom with the teacher Tora Holm (Bibi Andersson) is at first exciting for Elina, but she soon realizes that the teacher has prejudice toward Meänkieli-speakers (she refers to their language as Finnish), thinking they are less civilized and inferior and that Holm’s task at the school is, as Holm herself puts it, “to bring order to the wilderness.” As Elina stands up against Holm’s unjust treatment of another student, she becomes the target of the teacher’s prejudice. The more Elina resists becoming and passing as a Swede, the more she is excluded from the community and seeks a sense of belonging at the nearby bog. The film includes several sequences of Elina moving confidently around the bog, helping a local farmer to save a cow from drowning, and finding consolation in the soil, water, and moss of the bog along with her memories of her father. When Elina continues to resist Holm’s methods of dealing with children, Holm decides to pretend that Elina is invisible in order to discipline her. This leads Elina to run to the bog once more, except that this time she gets stuck and starts sinking into the bog pool. She is saved by another teacher, Einar, a new addition to the school, who has been more sympathetic toward Elina and who makes it to the bog just in time to help Elina’s mother and sister Irma pull Elina out. After this incident, the other schoolchildren and Einar join Elina’s resistance to Holm, which prompts Holm to ask for Elina’s forgiveness in one of the final scenes of the film.

While Elina is based on a novel that focuses more on Elina’s grief over her father’s death, the film addresses more directly the entangled colonial histories in Norrbotten, where the film is said to take place. This large county in northern Sweden includes both the Indigenous Sápmi lands as well as Tornedalen, the Tornio River valley where Tornedalians have lived for centuries. This borderland region in Elina is significant as the film depicts a complicated semi-colonial history of living between cultures, countries, and languages. Along with standard Finnish and the Sámi languages, it was forbidden to speak Meänkieli in Swedish schools throughout more than half of the twentieth century. As part of the politics of Swedishization, which increased at the end of the nineteenth century, the overwhelming attitude toward the use of Finnish language on the Swedish side of the border was that of suspicion, which was explained by security issues (Finland being under czarist Russian rule and possibly producing spies, for example).⁸ The government financially supported the building of new schools at the end of the nineteenth century and required the exclusive use of Swedish in school.

In telling this story about a mistreated child from the Tornedalian community in Sweden, Elina draws from the elements of melodramatic mode. This is a common move in Klaus Härö’s films, which have often focused on difficult histories by depicting innocent victim-heroes (often children) whose stories seek to provoke pathos among the viewers and eventually provide a resolution and healing. These films, including Elina, could certainly be read as simplified renditions of complicated histories where the happy endings promise national or familial healing, and their recurring child figures are more aligned with a normative reproduction of the nation and of the idealized child in Nordic culture.⁹ Furthermore, as Lydia Kokkola, Annbritt Palo, and Lena Manderstedt bring out, neither the author of the book that Elina is based on, nor Klaus Härö (a Finnish film director), nor the actors playing the main characters are Tornedalian, and the languages spoken in the film are Swedish and mostly standard Finnish, with only a few words and pronunciations in Meänkieli.¹⁰ Thus, with these positionalities in mind, the utopian happy ending that realigns the child with normative Swedishness could be read as an attempt to show a simplified version of a complicated history that is, through the apology of Holm, resolved for the majority audiences in Sweden and Finland. However, the utopian happy endings and simple surfaces of melodramatic mode also inspire alternative readings. As Jonathan Goldberg argues in his analysis of the films and theoretical writings of Douglas Sirk, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Todd Haynes, melodrama can inhabit a space “in whose extraordinary negations arise further questions, inarticulate inextinguishable feelings, the possibilities of impossibility.”¹¹ Furthermore, drawing from Haynes and from Thomas Elsaesser’s influential analysis of family melodrama, Goldberg writes that invisible is “the motor of melodrama,”¹² where the emotions of the characters spill into various features of mise-en-scène like mirrors, decor, colors, and shadows, as well as camera work and music.¹³ The film version of Elina foregrounds the impact of colonial/racial history on the child by incorporating the melodramatic mode and its emphasis of visual cues to make visible impossible situations where one is expected to grow up to become Swedish but at the same time feels like one cannot quite do so.

From the early sequences, the film establishes its portrayal of the teacher Tora Holm as an unpleasant person who represents outdated pedagogical and colonialist attitudes. When Holm walks with Elina to the classroom after their first meeting, the camera focuses on Elina reaching for the teacher’s hand, but Holm pulls it away, thus implying that she is a strict and unkind person, someone whom the audience should see as a villain. In the classroom, Holm punishes another student, Anton, for asking for Elina’s help with a word he does not know in Swedish. Holm forbids Anton to eat lunch that day, a common punishment in Swedish schools that was abolished in 1957. When Elina tries to explain that Anton asked her for help because he does not know the word in Swedish, Holm says he should only be asking help from the teacher and that the children are at the school to learn Swedish. When Elina sees Anton not having any food during the lunch hour, she decides to abstain from food too. This act of solidarity develops into a long-lasting conflict between Holm and Elina, and it is something the film version introduced. Namely, in the novel Elina does not eat lunch because she does not like pea soup, and when she eats meatballs the next day, Holm mocks her and says that children from such poor families should eat anything that is given to them. Härö’s film version, where Elina does not eat because she supports Anton, however, emphasizes that Elina stands up for injustice caused by colonial and assimilationist pedagogy. This allows the film to imagine a not-quite child whose actions are motivated by a higher moral and, eventually, to inspire the adults to change their ways.

The figure of the child who brings about a moral redemption or healing for the grown-up is a common trope in Hollywood cinema that Härö has mentioned as inspirational for his filmmaking.¹⁴ The child is also a recurring figure in many of these films that incorporate melodramatic mode, as Christof Decker has argued. Decker coins the term “melodramatic child” to signify a cinematic figure of the child who is “exceedingly vulnerable and thus easily victimized; … signifies a specific form of innocence, lacking the knowledge, prejudice and preconceptions of adults; … it has been regarded as the promise of a different, less painful and depressing future.”¹⁵ Decker argues that in three American films of the late 1990s, Pay It Forward (dir. Mimi Leder, 2000), The Sixth Sense (dir. M. Night Shyamalan, 1999), and Artificial Intelligence (dir. Steven Spielberg, 2001), the child figure is “a utopian inspiration for the adult world. Helping, communicating, initiating social change, or preserving the memory of the human race, it becomes a force of improvement.”¹⁶ In such narratives, according to Decker, the child functions as someone who saves the adults from their mistakes and ultimately serves as a healing force for the nation. While the social change inspired by the child in these films involves coming to terms with national crimes and traumas in American history, including slavery, it is important to remember that the child played by Haley Joel Osment in all of these three films featured in Decker’s analysis, is a white American boy. What differentiates Elina from the children Decker writes about is that while the children in the films that he studies are all white American boys (even though one of them is robotic), Elina is positioned as someone who is not quite Swedish and not quite white. What happens when the features of the melodramatic child intersect with the not-quite child? Can a figure who is expected to become Swedish but who also experiences not quite being included in Sweden initiate social change? Does she promise a less painful and better future for Sweden or for the Finnish- or Meänkieli-speaking minorities, or does she defy national boundaries and go against the traditional image of the child as a herald for a future of a nation? Is it possible for her to inspire change if she is not seen or if her resistance to power is seen as a behavior to be suppressed? By making use of lighting, music, and elements of mise-en-scène, Elina visually constructs the not-quite child who draws from the aspirations of the melodramatic child but eventually demonstrates that the inspiring and healing force of the melodramatic child is possible only if the child is returned to the trajectory of lining up with the normative familial/national ideals.

Elina’s challenging of Holm’s authority and the resulting conflicts in the film refer, on one hand, to a common trope of power play between children and adults in various texts of children’s culture. Peter Hunt, for example, brings out that this power relationship is inherently part of children’s literature already on the level of authorship: Since it is rarely the children who are writing children’s books, the adults who are no longer children have the power to write about children to children.¹⁷ Moreover, Elina’s standing up for justice and her independence could suggest that she is able to perform the ideal image of the Swedish child. However, the film positions Elina and Holm in some of the scenes in the classroom to visualize power structures that go beyond the child-adult hierarchy. In a sequence where Holm is alone with Elina in the classroom and tells her to apologize for her rebellious attitude, the camera positions Holm in front of the strong daylight coming from the window, brightening up Holm’s head and leaving Elina in the shadow of the blackboard (fig. 1). The shot of Holm in front of the window brings to mind some of the films of Ingmar Bergman and his cinematographer Sven Nykvist, whose use of light has been an inspiration for Härö’s cinematographer Jarkko T. Laine.¹⁸ Bibi Andersson, who plays Holm in Elina, is also known for her roles in several of Bergman’s films, and in Elina she bears a resemblance to the male characters who in those films often represent institutions of power, like the church, academia, or patriarchy more broadly. The shot with Holm in front of the window in Elina particularly resembles the shots of the protagonist pastor Tomas Ericsson (Gunnar Björnstrand) in Nattvardsgästerna (Winter Light, dir. Ingmar Bergman, 1963), one of the primary models for the use of light for Laine.¹⁹ The intense light coming from the window in several scenes in Winter Light functions as a problematization of religion and the power of the church as an institution in the lives of the middle-class Swedish people. In Elina, in turn, the light coming from the window behind Holm illuminates the power of institutions that maintain colonialist mentality toward the minorities living in northern Sweden.

With this intertextual reference to light in Bergman’s film, Elina emphasizes the ways in which colonial and religious discourses have been connected in racial hierarchies that separated between the colonizer as civilized and enlightened and the colonized as not civilized, inferior people who live in spiritual darkness. In the context of settler colonialism, these ideologies were similar as the assimilation of Indigenous populations to the settler colonial societies (which resulted in elimination) was often understood as a way of “civilizing” the colonized populations. In visual culture, as Richard Dyer argues, depictions of light coming from above have been explicit symbols of superiority as the light makes white bodies glow and suggests they are enlightened. The explicit juxtaposition of Holm in the strong daylight and Elina in the dark shadow of the board visualizes the construction of racialized distinction between Swedes and Tornedalians/Finns, both of whom are white. This momentary visual darkness of Elina’s white body complicates Dyer’s reading of white bodies in northern Europe as “the whitest whites in the white racial hierarchy.”²⁰ Arne Lunde, among others, has challenged this description of northern Europe as homogeneous and white by pointing out that the Scandinavian actors in classical Hollywood cinema “become truly white in American terms (only after) constructed as white in assimilation process.”²¹ While Lunde’s analysis brings out another example of white bodies who were considered not-quite/not-yet white as they migrated to a different continent, and who had to “become truly white” through assimilation, Elina visualizes the experiences of not-yet/not-quite white people who were racialized within the Nordic region. At the same time, the brief visual darkening of Elina, which seeks to represent the constructed difference of a body that is othered, is also reminiscent of the problematic rhetoric that aligns the experiences of racialized white Tornedalians with communities of color and risks contributing to racial stereotypes that locate a raced body in darkness.

In its use of light and darkness Elina also emphasizes the intersection of social class and racialization of Tornedalians and Finnish-speakers in Sweden. Throughout the whole narrative, the film shows that poverty makes the not quite Swedish minority depend on the goodwill of Swedes and causes them not to fight against the discriminatory power structures. Elina’s mother, Marta, does not support Elina’s rebellion against Holm as she explains that Holm has helped them with shoes and other necessary items. The sequences at Elina’s home show the interior almost always in darkness, with lamps or windows as limited sources of light. The dark domestic space is where Marta explains to Elina that Holm is a kind person and that they must keep in good graces with her and how Elina has been ungrateful when she has refused to eat the school lunches. The film, then, makes visible the perception that Meänkieli-/Finnish-speakers inhabit spaces that are dirtier and darker in the effort to visualize them as not quite Swedes, as well as the justification for the forced assimilation policies in Sweden.

The sequence where Marta washes the school’s hallway makes explicit this contrast between light and darkness caused by race and class. The establishing shot shows us the schoolhouse from outside in full daylight. Then the camera cuts to Marta in a long shot. She is washing the floor in a dark hallway with a deep dark space behind her and very little light coming from the hallway windows. Tora Holm steps in front of the camera, stops for a moment, and then walks slowly toward Marta with shoes in her hand. When Marta notices her, she gets up, and with that her body becomes lighter in the daylight coming from the windows. In the contrast of the dark hallway, the coming of Holm with the shoes makes Marta’s body lighter as she smiles and thanks Holm for her help. This use of light visualizes the belief that the Swedish welfare state, represented here by the educational institution, is enlightened and morally exceptional as it provides aid to those it considers less civilized and in poverty. Holm then proceeds to tell Marta about Elina’s behavior. In the next sequence Marta comes home to Elina and her sister Irma; she looks distraught as she sits down in the dark shadow. Elina asks her what is wrong in Finnish, but Marta scolds Elina in Swedish for rebelling against Holm. She does not want Elina to resist the injustice, because of their dependence on the aid from the Swedish welfare state, and thus she accepts the assimilationist policies, which includes the requirement for the Meänkieli/Finnish-speakers to speak Swedish. As these examples of lighting and other elements of mise-en-scène in Elina demonstrate, the film seeks to make visible the intensity of historical injustice experienced by people in the northern areas of Sweden. By incorporating moments where the otherwise unseen racialization is made visible through shadows, the film contributes to the problematic rhetoric that emphasizes the racialization of Tornedalians in Sweden by making use of racial stereotypes and ideologies. At the same time, the sequences where Tornedalian characters are darkened visually are brief and temporary thus maintaining that they can pass as white Swedes at any moment.

THE BOG AS A SITE OF LIMINALITY AND NOT-QUITENESS

The nearby bog has a significant function in the film to visually explore Elina’s experience of grief and not-quiteness, which is ultimately connected to the memory of her father. In several sequences throughout the film, Elina goes to the bog because she feels the presence of her dead father there—it was the place where they used to spend time together—and to escape the injustice that she experiences at school. While this film is intended for both children and adults and thus does not linger on the potential uncanny of bogs for too long, the inherent conception of bogs as dangerous, dark, mysterious places that might hide bodies functions as a reminder of Elina’s father’s death. She believes that her father is waiting for her in the bog, and in several sequences the use of a handheld camera creates an impression that someone is with Elina. On one hand, the bog sequences function as a didactic move to suggest that Elina avoids dealing with her grief. Instead of going to the cemetery with her mother to see her father’s grave, she prefers to imagine that her father is with her in the bog. The bog, however, is significant on more levels as it accompanies Elina’s frustration about the injustice she experiences because of her Tornedalian heritage. The bog embodies her not-quiteness; at first it provides a space for escape and play, but it becomes dangerous and tries to overcome Elina’s body. Thus, Elina needs to be saved from the bog/not-quiteness and return to the predictable path of lining up with Swedishness.

The forest and the bog where Elina runs and plays reflect on both the space of the proximate and nearly invisible border between Finland and Sweden and the stereotypical depictions of Finns living in forest settings, “primitive,” poor, and less civilized in Swedish media during the twentieth century. The bog thus refers not only to a geographical border between the two nation-states and the several cultural communities living in the northern parts of the Nordic region but also to feelings of in-betweenness. In cultural imagination, bogs, which are neither water nor land, are often seen as liminal and ambiguous spaces. According to Derek Gladwin, many Irish postcolonial Gothic texts incorporate bogs because their multidimensionality challenges the binary thinking that is typically prevalent in nationalist and imperial projects.²² Karin Sanders describes this multidimensionality in her analysis of bog bodies as she writes that bogs are “thresholds between surfaces and depths, ambiguous sites of origin.… They bring about spatial and temporal disorientation.”²³ Moreover, she argues that bog bodies fascinate us because they are both “‘rooted’ in and ‘uprooted’ from a sense of national identity; they are both familiar and strange.”²⁴ Elina does not depict the bog as overtly dangerous throughout most of the film (until the sequence where she almost drowns there), nor does it reveal any bog bodies, but the bog is differentiated from other spaces in the film as external to life in the Swedish village, where the minorities are expected to become Swedes, even if there is no hope for them to fully do so.

Elina’s movement through the bog visualizes the constancy of rooting and unrooting the Swedish and Tornedalian/Finnish identities. The camera shows us how she keeps moving through the bog as it visualizes her resistance to unrooting her Tornedalian/Finnish identity and the forced rooting of Swedish identity. She repeats several times the mantra that her father taught her to stay safe in the bog: One must keep moving; one cannot stop. The camera follows her movement closely. In the close-ups of her feet stepping into the moss that goes down under her weight and then immediately rises back up, the bog is depicted as the ultimate refuge from a fixed and forced rootedness in one national identity. This up-and-down movement in the bog as a site of not-quiteness could be read as a visual image of Kathryn Bond Stockton’s theorization of sideways growth discussed in the introduction: growing to the side of cultural ideals that locates energy and vitality in the back-and-forth instead of the reproductive. Before Elina gets stuck, the bog sequences also provide her with more agency as the audience hears her thoughts and shares her gaze through several point-of-view (POV) shots, differently from the other sequences of the film. The bog is a space where Elina can speak Finnish freely and where she feels connected to her father, who, as we can assume from Elina’s and Holm’s memories of him, had also subverted the hegemony of Swedish language (he had told Elina to speak Finnish and Holm describes him as rebellious).

Running and playing in the bog also remediate common images of childhood in Western culture. Karen Lury argues that children playing with mud and water in films often functions as an ignorance of cleanliness and as a representation of the joy and autonomy of childhood.²⁵ As the autonomy and free roaming are even more significant in the images of the Nordic child, Elina performs this idealized child figure in many ways. However, the bog, where Elina has more agency and where she expresses her frustrations over injustice caused by the institution that wants to erase part of her identity, makes Elina’s body visibly different. In some shots it makes her look dirtier and darker, and the deep dark water almost overtakes her in the sequences when she has run to the bog after Holm has called her invisible. By doing so, the film creates an explicit correlation between racialized Tornedalian bodies and their invisibility, presenting a paradox in that the feelings of difference and displacement increase as Elina becomes invisible in the spaces that represent Swedish state, education, and society.

Becoming overtaken by mud and water in Elina ends up with her almost drowning and thus challenges the cultural depictions of a safe, playful, and autonomous childhood in the Swedish welfare state. Instead, as a not quite Swedish child, Elina’s liminality becomes visible in the bog, which eventually becomes dangerous for her. The injustice and discrimination that she experiences in the Swedish institution makes the space where she has freely roamed life-threatening since she becomes stuck right after Holm has tried to invite her away from the bog but instead leaves her there. Elina is differentiated from the other children of the village, however, who are also roaming quite freely but are afraid of the bog and do not go there. In most of the sequences, the other children do not resist the required assimilation and injustice that they experience. They are also seen as not quite Swedish; Holm says that she has to bring order to their lives and teach them Swedish, but they have accepted their situation—or at least they do not see the point in resisting. Their not-quiteness is invisible enough that it gets lost in the traditional promise of a “not-yet” in the figure of the child. In other words, they are not quite Swedish because they have not yet learned everything they need to become Swedish through the assimilationist educational policy. They suffer silently through the injustice at school, but they do not resist and therefore do not end up in dangerous situations as Elina does.

Elina thus constructs the not-quite child as a figure whose not-quiteness is something to be overcome and resolved. The need to keep moving in the bog entails a potential danger. If one stays in one spot for too long, one might get stuck and drown in the bog water with no trace. While the bog functions as a space of refuge and agency for Elina, the film also suggests she might disappear in there. This is visible in several long shots where Elina’s body blends with the forests in the background, or in the close-ups of her body and skin in the intimate contact with the moss, mud, water, and tree branches that make it look like the bog swallows her. After Holm has announced and pretended in the classroom that Elina is invisible, Elina runs to the bog. The camera shows her face in a close-up as she lies on the moss of the bog and says she will never leave her father. Now the bog seems to be overtaking her, suggesting a tragic fate of someone who resists the assimilationist policies of becoming Swedish. Elina’s running to the bog prompts Holm to go after her, but when Elina does not listen to her teacher, and the other children are observing her, Holm leaves Elina in the bog. The boundary where the forest becomes bog functions as a barrier between them, as Holm is afraid to go closer to Elina, and the branches on the boundary of the forest and the bog hit her face. Elina looks at Holm as she is leaving and forgets the rule about having to keep moving in the bog. She becomes stuck and starts to slowly sink. In his study of Nordic ecocinema, Pietari Kääpä argues that as a liminal space, the bog in Elina “facilitates a moment of intercultural awareness, enabling understanding between the protagonists of the film.”²⁶ However, as I have demonstrated, the bog sequences are charged with liminality, which is ultimately seen as dangerous and as something that the not-quite child needs to be saved from.

SAVING THE NOT-QUITE CHILD

Elina achieves the resolution to the child’s not-quiteness by incorporating a white, grown-up Swedish savior figure, the newly arrived teacher Einar Björk, who questions Holm’s actions, rescues Elina from drowning, and brings about the reconciliation between Holm and Elina. As the film introduces and establishes the savior figure, similarly to its melodramatic depiction of Elina as a not-quite child who suffers from injustice, it makes extensive use of framing, lighting, and various elements of mise-en-scène to emphasize Elina’s troubling situation and to imagine a happy ending to it. In an early sequence of the film, where Einar enters the village, everything in the mise-en-scène predicts a resolution. As the camera cuts to both adults and children looking expectedly toward the road, the soundtrack changes to a cheerful melody, and the warm lighting contrasts the earlier sequences of Elina and Holm in cold, low-key lighting. Einar’s car has broken down and he has had to borrow a horse from a local villager; thus his appearance on the village road, alongside a horse, slowly making his way toward the people, makes an explicit reference to a white savior figure that, as Matthew Hughey articulates it, draws from cultural imaginaries of the Christ figure and stabilizes and reduces the complexity of intercultural interactions into a digestible narrative of redemption.²⁷ Einar has a different attitude toward the children from the first moments of meeting them; for instance, he learns some words in their language and tries to understand the children’s circumstances; thus, typically to common images of white saviors, his storyline moves the narrative toward resolution while he learns on the way about the different and difficult life of the Tornedalian minority in this Swedish village.

As he witnesses Holm’s cruel and unjust behavior toward Elina, Einar tries first to convince Elina to eat and not think about what Holm has done. This is not successful because Holm overhears them and tells Einar that their job is to educate the Finnish-speakers, which she calls a “hopeless task.” Einar does not confront Holm but follows her silently inside. He then tries to find other ways to help. He sees Elina in the forest and attempts to make a better connection with her, asking for her help in identifying edible mushrooms. When he proposes that they could tell the local authorities about Holm’s actions, Elina says her mother would not like it and runs away. The camera contrasts this conversation, which takes place in the tighter space in the middle of the birch trees, with the open space of the bog. The sequences taking place in the forest illustrate the confinement that Elina experiences when confronted with her sister, Einar, her mother, or Holm. Following this encounter in the forest, Einar goes to talk to Elina’s mother. As he steps into the barn, he is depicted as too tall and clumsy in the tight, dark space. This visual illustration of his following exclamation that he has never been in a barn before further establishes him as a well-meaning representative of the dominant culture who is unaware of the history and power structures in the village. He feels compassion for Elina in her situation but also declines to address it fully. He does not explain to Elina’s mother what has happened and simply recommends that Elina might want to take a sandwich to school with her.

In these sequences, Einar is depicted as clumsy and nervous because he does not know about the experiences and history of the Tornedalians in northern Sweden. He tries to help, but his ignorance and attempts not to confront the dominant culture fully might make things worse. For example, in the sequence where Elina and her mother are carrying a heavy box of food on the side of the road, Einar stops and offers to give them a ride. This well-meaning act, however, becomes dangerous when Elina accidentally starts the car and it almost crashes into Holm, who is on her bike. Holm charges Einar by saying that this happens when there are no adults who take responsibility and that no one will want to have children in charge. Elina’s mother sides with Holm, which prompts Holm to promise her that she will find winter shoes for Elina. At this point the audience might feel sorry for Einar, who in his clumsiness and unawareness has simply tried to help. The Swedish audience watching the film in the early 2000s might understand Einar the most because he represents a new worldview for the institution that confronts racist and discriminatory attitudes. The colonialist and derogatory style of teaching that Holm represents, which was still common in the 1950s, is condemned in contemporary Sweden, while the experiences and history of Tornedalians are still largely invisible.

Einar thus plays a significant role in reducing the uncomfortable narrative of Elina as a not-quite child in Sweden into a digestible narrative of redemption. He also facilitates a return to a moral certainty. As Linda Williams argues in her influential essay on the melodramatic mode, it is often melodrama’s tendency to “find solutions to problems that cannot really be solved without challenging the older ideologies of moral certainty to which melodrama wishes to return.”²⁸ When Elina has gotten stuck in the bog, it is Einar who plays the key role in saving her. Elina’s mother is also helping her, but she cannot pull her out by herself. Elina is slowly sinking into the bog pool water, and her sister has to run through the forest to the school to get Einar and make it back in time to save Elina. When Einar hears about Elina, he takes Holm’s board with the class plans as something sturdy to help save Elina. Here, then, he visually takes down Holm’s colonialist “life work” of bringing civilization to the wilderness as he finally fulfills his role as a savior of the not-quite child.

The sequence where Einar saves Elina makes use of teasing delay, which, as Williams writes, “needs to be linked with melodrama’s larger impulse to reverse time, to return to the time of origins and the space of innocence that can musically be felt in terms of patterns of anticipation and return.”²⁹ As the camera cross-cuts to Elina in the bog pool and Irma running with Einar, the film teases with the idea that Einar might be too late to save her. This expands the time that Elina is in the bog pool and also allows for her to have a conversation with her mother before Einar gets there. Elina tells her mother that she came to the bog because she thought her father needed her there and because she is a troublemaker just like him. Elina’s mother, however, explains to Elina that her father was courageous and that she would indeed like Elina to be like him. Being a “troublemaker” in this conversation is reduced to the fact that he was sick but refused to rest, even though earlier in the film it is implied that he might have resisted the assimilationist politics as it is he who told Elina to keep speaking Finnish. Elina, being like her father, changes in this sequence from resisting the assimilationist policies to being courageous; thus the film returns her to the trajectory of performing the features of the idealized Swedish child who is autonomous, competent, and moral. While her running into the bog had been a combination of the discrimination she experienced and her grief for her father, this reconciling conversation between Elina and her mother brings her father’s death to the foreground and does not address Elina’s resistance to Holm’s injustice. The expansion of time in this sequence, along with the music that supports anticipation, sets the stage for reconciliation and melodrama’s return to innocence. What this means in Elina is that the child who has experienced not-quiteness and discrimination because of the Swedish welfare state is rescued from her path of resistance to assimilation politics by showing explicitly that the space associated with the identity and heritage that is not Swedish is dangerous for her. The audience can sigh in relief when Einar makes it just in time to help Elina’s mother pull her out of the bog.

In the final sequence, after he has saved Elina from drowning, Einar sides with the children in supporting Elina as she again walks out of the dining hall after more hurtful remarks from Holm. The sequence builds up its emotional affect as Irma, who until now has been ashamed of Elina’s resistance, decides to go outside to support Elina and one by one other children and Einar follow her. When they have all gone outside, the composition of the children sitting together on the stairs in the long shot makes a powerful impression of unity and resistance. Seeing Einar join the children leads Holm to suddenly change her attitude, go outside as well, and ask Elina for forgiveness. As she makes her way down to the lowest stairs through the group of children, the power structure between her and Elina changes visually, at least for this moment. Holm cries and admits she has been unfair and behaved badly, “even though (her) intentions were good.” She tells Elina to go inside with the other children and eat so that she can grow strong and do well in life. In her analysis of crying in melodrama, Linda Williams argues that tears sustain the fantasy that the demand for satisfaction that can never be satisfied will in fact be satisfied. In Elina the tears on Holm’s face help to reconcile the image of the Swedish welfare state and its institutions as antiracist and morally exceptional, which is possible only in fictional accounts that can go back in time, bring out injustice within these institutions of the past, and at the same time fix them. In this way the film provides moral and emotional healing for the audiences who might be disturbed and perhaps even feel vague guilt or shame about the history of systemic discrimination in Sweden. There is also an invitation for emotional healing for audiences who share Finnish or Tornedalian heritage as they can, along with Elina, receive the apology from the representative of the Swedish institution. In their article on apology in Elina and in Sameblod, Kokkola, Palo, and Manderstedt write that by funding these films, “which encourage viewers to feel hurt and shame, the nation enacts an apology via substitution.”³⁰

It is the melodramatic mode of the film that helps to fully carry out the reconciliation and emotional healing that result in Einar’s actions as a white savior and in this final sequence of Holm’s apology. While exhibiting traits similar to Decker’s “melodramatic child” as she inspires national and familial healing for the grown-up world in this Nordic context, the child has to be saved from the dangerous path of not-quiteness by a grown-up. As argued before, the reconciliation in the film is inspired by Elina but possible only with Einar’s help, in order to restore the image of a caring welfare state. The sequence of Holm’s apology to Elina provides a reconciliation from a feeling of collective shame through the listening child, who is not yet an adult and will continue on her path to become Swedish. The happy ending of Härö’s film, then, aligns its depiction of childhood with the traditional and normative vision of the child as a herald of futurity, a not yet citizen whose becoming promises familial and national continuity. The film reconciles the uncomfortable image of an institution that causes trauma and displacement for the child in the welfare state. Elina’s “not-quiteness” is resolved; she is again visibly similar to the other children on their way to becoming Swedes.

The sequence where Holm apologizes, however, includes a visual cue that reminds the viewer that the happy ending, just as in many other melodramas, as Jonathan Goldberg or Thomas Elsaesser have argued, is only a facade. The happy ending is utopian and impossible, thus at the same time undoing the moral certainty toward which the film has moved. As the camera focuses on Holm, who apologizes through tears, it positions Anton in the background so that whenever Holm is speaking, we can see Anton’s face as well. Holm does not ask for forgiveness from Anton or from the other children who have similarly experienced her discriminatory attitude and rigid pedagogy. It was Anton, after all, whom Holm first forbid to eat lunch, which started Elina’s active resistance to Holm. Anton’s face in the sequence of Holm’s apology, then, reminds the viewer that the reconciliation between the not-quite child and the Swedish welfare state is a fantasy. “There are no happy endings,” writes Goldberg; “history is not simply moving ever forward.”³¹ In other words, by imagining a reconciliation that assumes that the not-quite child is taken back on track to line up with Swedishness, Elina includes a possibility that moving forward in the way the film imagines it is not really a happy ending.

SAMEBLOD

Sameblod, directed by Swedish-Sámi filmmaker Amanda Kernell, depicts a South Sámi girl named Elle-Marja (Lene Cecilia Sparrok) in Swedish Sápmi in the 1930s. The majority of the film is an extended flashback of Elle-Marja as a young girl, but it is framed by her as a grown-up (Maj-Doris Rimpi) in her later years of life, when she goes by the name Christina. The opening sequences show us her son and granddaughter as they are driving to Elle-Marja/Christina’s sister’s funeral in Sápmi and encouraging Elle-Marja/Christina to participate in the family’s activities, which she rejects as she repeats the internalized stereotypes about the Sámi people and says she does not want to have anything to do with them. The extended flashback that soon follows begins with Elle-Marja and her sister Njenna (Mia Erika Sparrok) getting ready to leave for the boarding school for Sámi children. The film’s portrayal of the boarding school where children of Sámi reindeer herders had to go resembles the school setting in Elina. The children are not allowed to speak their first language (South Sámi in this case) at school and are allowed to speak only Swedish. The derogatory attitudes and violence that the children experience because of their indigeneity, however, manifest themselves much further than only at the school. The Sámi children are mocked by the other children and youth living in the village, and Elle-Marja faces derogatory and prejudiced attitudes in almost every encounter where she is outed as a Sámi by Swedes. While her Swedish schoolteacher, Christina Lajler (Hanna Alström), seems to support Elle-Marja’s interest and progress in learning Swedish language and literature, she rejects Elle-Marja’s wish to continue her studies, basing her decision on the racial biology texts that she is reading as she states, “Sámi brains are not capable.”

The film follows Elle-Marja’s realization that no matter how well she does in school, she is expected to stay in Sápmi in order to herd her family’s reindeer and to not “die out,” as Lajler puts it. Along with the other children at the school, Elle-Marja goes through a humiliating experience of researchers from Uppsala measuring their skulls and taking photographs of their naked bodies. Elle-Marja eventually decides to run away from school; takes a train to Uppsala; and after failed attempts to stay for an extended period at the home of a young Swedish man, Niklas, she enrolls in the girls’ school in Uppsala under the name Christina Lajler from Germany. She makes one last trip back to Sápmi to ask her mother for her father’s silver belt in order to pay for the school. This request is not well received by her mother, who gives Elle-Marja the silver belt only after the daughter has killed one of their reindeer. The camera then cuts back to Elle-Marja/Christina in her later life, which was depicted in the early sequences of the film. Now she goes to the church where her sister’s body is still in the coffin and asks for her forgiveness, and then she walks and climbs up the mountains to reach the area where her family used to live.

Through this journey of becoming someone else, a Swedish girl Christina, Sameblod visualizes the experience of not-quiteness as it relates to indigeneity and racialization in Sweden. Sameblod can be situated among the various cinematic depictions and reflections on Sámi history and identity that have come out during the late twentieth and early twenty- first centuries in the Nordic region. It shares characteristics with historical dramas such as Pathfinder (Ofelaš, 1987) and Kautokeino Rebellion (Kautokeino-upprøret, 2008) by Nils Gaup in mediating the traumatic memory of the Sámi people through a format that is relatively easily understandable for a wide range of audience.³² Sameblod, too, incorporates experiences that have become monuments in Sámi collective memory, such as the violent visits of the researchers of race biology, discrimination at boarding schools, racist and derogatory encounters with those identified as Swedes, and leaving Sápmi. Some of the questions that Sameblod is asking, however, connect it to recent more experimental and self-reflexive Sámi documentaries. These films, such as Sámi nieida jojk (Sámi Daughter’s Jojk, dir. Liselotte Wajstedt, 2007), Bihttoš (Rebel, dir. Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers, 2014), and Sparrooabbán (Me and My Little Sister, dir. Suvi West, 2016), ask questions like what it means to grow up to become a different person or what the impacts of internalized colonization are intergenerationally. While Wajstedt and Tailfeathers approach these questions in a more experimental way, Sameblod shares their focus on a self-reflexive cultural memory work that challenges cultural revivalist narratives.³³

Answering the question of where the idea for Sameblod came from, Amanda Kernell says she has always wondered, “Can you really become another person, and what happened to this generation? … What does it do to you to grow up in a time where you were seen as an inferior race?”³⁴ As Sameblod engages with these questions, it goes beyond simply making racialization visible through problematic visual contrasts of darkness and light that we see in Elina, as it reflects on the meaning of seeing (who is seeing what/whom) through its emphasized incorporation of mirrors, watching, and looking away in several sequences. Furthermore, in its pursuit to depict what internalized racialization and colonization feels like, Sameblod constructs tactile images that linger on the skin of the not-quite child (both her actual skin and the fabric of her clothes). This produces a different embodied reaction for the film audience than with Elina; instead of pathos and strife for justice enhanced by the melodramatic mode, Sameblod contemplates the bodily impact of colonization and racialization on a child who is about to “grow up” and become an adult Sámi who, according to the laws in 1930s Sweden, must live in a segregated community.

THE GAZE AND TOUCH OF THE INDIGENOUS CHILD

Within the early sequences, Sameblod establishes its emphasis on the sensory elements, particularly sight and touch, as it contemplates the racialized not quite whiteness of the Sámi people. The first sequence of the film shows us elderly Christina in a close-up profile shot. She is lighting a cigarette and looking toward something, possibly through the window that is behind her. We hear her son calling her name in the distance as the camera lingers on her; she breathes heavily and touches her ear (which, as we later find out, is a significant bodily memory of the violence she encountered as a child). Then the camera cuts to her looking out of the car window, her gaze pointed again for several seconds at something we cannot see until she responds to her son’s comment about the Sámi music playing on the CD that she has nothing to do with those people. While the early sequences depict Christina at an old age, a similar focus on her eyes and her skin as a child occur frequently throughout the rest of the film. This framing of the Indigenous child’s gaze in Sameblod engages with and rethinks the idea that the child’s eyes provide a different, easily understandable, defamiliarized perspective for the adult audiences and, further, that this perspective is often inspired by the moral compass of the child.

Instead of directly addressing the camera or always providing the viewers with POV shots (though there are several shots from behind the head and shoulders of Elle-Marja as she is looking toward the lake, forest, or people), the use of the shots that depict her in a close-up or medium shot looking away functions to visualize the experience of a not-quite child who is not able to readily assume the idealized figure of the child resisting injustice (the way that Pippi Longstocking or even Elina are imagined to do). In her analysis on Mohawk artist Shelley Niro’s video constellation The Shirt, Monika Siebert argues that looking at the camera and then looking away in Niro’s project responds to the long history of how Indigenous people have been represented in European and Anglo-American cultures. While the direct gaze in The Shirt secures the Indigenous subjectivity and agency, looking elsewhere functions as a “plea for disengagement from the entangled North American gaze, from its contests over agency and subjectivity and from the imperatives of resistance it imposes.”³⁵ Sameblod is in many aspects a completely different project, a historical drama that primarily portrays the history of colonization and racism toward the Sámi people. However, the camera’s focus on looking away, which disengages from the settler colonial gaze, is a helpful concept to analyze the emphasis on Elle-Marja’s gaze in this film. This disengagement resonates with Troy Storfjell’s point about Sameblod in his analysis on Elle-Máijá Apiniskim Tailfeathers’s film—namely, that these films challenge “settler audiences with the interweaving of the personal and the political in Indigenous lives” and that they tell their stories “without the expectation that they should relate everything they write to the colonial center of the settler state.”³⁶ Furthermore, as Harald Gaski has demonstrated, Sámi cultural traditions (particularly, the lyrics of yoik, the traditional Sámi vocal genre), often have “both the goal and intention that a Sami should be able to understand more than a non-Sami.”³⁷

In the sequence that follows the photographing/measuring and the attack by the local boys, Elle-Marja looks in the mirror as she washes away the blood from her ear. We see a brief glimpse of her gaze in the mirror, and then the camera cuts to a close-up of her touching her face and looking toward the mirror. The camera lingers on her look for a few seconds before cutting to a fifteen-second-long take of her in a medium close-up shot, looking away (fig. 2). This emphasis on her look constructs a gaze that disengages from the imperative of resistance that might be expected from the child figure in a Swedish film made in 2016 or, in general, from a child figure in a film that deals with historical injustice. The disengagement in Elle-Marja’s gaze illustrates, on one hand, the ways in which the film narrative deals with the impossibility of the Sámi child in the 1930s to resist the settler colonial power, but it also reorients the child’s gaze so that the expected/assumed new perspective is not visible or accessible. There is a similar emphasis on her looking away in the sequence where the young Swedish man Niklas, whom she visits in Uppsala, has asked her to leave his family’s house because his parents do not approve of a romantic relationship between them. When he has closed the door, the camera lingers on Elle-Marja, who turns her head back toward the door (also toward the camera but never looking directly at it) and then looks slightly away. This is followed by a long shot of her sitting in the park and then a close-up high-angle shot of her face until she touches her ear.

Connecting the different acts of perceiving (gaze and touch) in the child figure is a common move in films and other cultural texts. Ingmar Bergman’s Tystnaden (The Silence, 1963) is a well-known example of artistic/cinematic engagement with the child who is aimlessly wandering in a hotel and a train, in a constant state of perceiving, as Maaret Koskinen argues.³⁸ The camera focuses on him watching and touching the window, looking toward the camera with an empty look, not having knowledge of the whole, perceiving only fragments of the people, architecture, and paintings around him. The child in The Silence is, of course, a white Swedish boy, and his wandering empty look is a part of Bergman’s 1960s modernist cinema. Because Elle-Marja is a Sámi girl in the 1930s, as the film made in 2016 constructs it, her gaze and its connection to the other acts of perception engage with the audience differently from those of the child who resists injustice or the child who is simply wandering. By connecting the gaze that looks away at something we cannot see with the touch of her skin, the film reflects on what it might mean for a film to visualize the experiences of racialization for the not-quite child but without creating contrasts of dark and light that would further contribute to racial stereotypes.

Sameblod thus challenges the power of seeing in making visible the effects of racialization and instead explores those through the acts of feeling and touching. It connects visibility and tactility in its incorporation of the traditional clothing, gákti.³⁹ It was a common practice to wear gákti throughout one’s everyday life, and as Katariina Kyrölä and Tuija Huuki argue, “The processes of making it and wearing it are considered important and respected corporeal and affective markers of a Sámi identity” because otherwise “Sámi identity is not necessarily visually distinguishable from white non-indigenous bodies.”⁴⁰ At the same time, as Kyrölä and Huuki bring out in their analysis of gákti in the documentary Sparrooabbán, gákti also “bears the weight of the transgenerational, affectively transmitted experiences of Sámi oppression.”⁴¹ Kyrölä and Huuki use Valerie Walkerdine’s concept “second skin” to describe how gákti functions as a psychic second skin that functions as a boundary for the collective, protecting and holding the community together.⁴² In the documentary they write about, gákti is a psychic object that is both meaningful but also, in order to bring a sense of safety, can be used as a way to exclude some who do not fit in the gendered understanding (this is influenced by settler colonialism) of who gets to wear gákti and how they are allowed to or supposed to do that. In Sameblod, gákti also refers to its complicated history: The children in the boarding school are not allowed to wear anything else, and in several sequences of them walking through the village with the teacher, they are seen as a spectacle by the local people. Gákti functions in these moments as a second skin in that it differentiates the people who are otherwise visibly like the Swedish majority.

The sequences that feature Elle-Marja’s attempts to change out of her gákti go beyond the visibility of it and focus on the materiality of the fabric as skin. Thus, not only does the film show us how gákti can be used to make invisible differences visible, but it also attempts to make the viewers physically feel it. In the moments that focus on touch and texture of the clothes, the film incorporates what Laura Marks discusses as “haptic images” in intercultural cinema. These images, according to Marks, are “often used in an explicit critique of visual mastery, in the search for ways to bring the image closer to the body and the other senses.”⁴³ The sequence where Elle-Marja takes off her gákti to try on a dress that is hanging on the clothesline is filmed almost exclusively in close-up, drawing our attention to her touching the dress, smelling it, and then taking off her gákti and putting on the dress. The sound of the fabric as Elle-Marja touches it (fig. 3) or as it moves in the wind combines the optic image with brief haptic ones that illustrate the film’s ultimate goal of representing not-quiteness and racialization as embodied and felt instead of something mastered by the gaze of the audience. Visibility is, of course, deeply connected to the felt not-quiteness, as after she has put on the dress, some Swedish young men who pass by see her and invite her to a dance party in the evening. By focusing the viewers’ attention on the touch and surfaces of the gákti and the other dress as Elle-Marja gets changed, the sequence illustrates in a visual and embodied manner that the gákti functions as skin, something that Elle-Marja has to change into and out of in order to pass or not pass as a Swede.

Changing one’s clothes is, of course, a whole lot easier than changing one’s actual skin, and despite the oppression that Elle-Marja faces, the film also points to some amount of privilege that her whiteness provides for her. After changing her clothes, she passes for a Swedish girl and holds a conversation with Niklas at a dance party without him realizing that she is Sámi. She is outed by her sister and the schoolteacher who have come looking for her. As she belongs to the reindeer-herding Sámi in the 1930s, who were officially required to be segregated, Elle-Marja is forced to wear her gákti and does not own any other clothes. In order to “change her skin” she has to steal different clothing, and when she is found out at the dance party because her sister has told one of the school workers about what Elle-Marja has done, she is punished and then has to change back to her gákti. Our skin, as Jennifer Barker puts it, functions both as a covering and an uncovering, because of its “simultaneous proximity to the public world and to the secretive inner body.”⁴⁴ Gákti as a second skin uncovers the Sámi identity that would otherwise be quite invisible to other people. Wearing a different dress covers the part of Elle-Marja’s identity that she has been taught to feel ashamed about.

Because of the experience of the gákti as a second skin, which has become oppressive, Elle-Marja decides to destroy it on her way leaving Sápmi. While still wearing the gákti on the train to Uppsala, she notices that people are looking at her suspiciously. She steals another dress from one of the sleeping passengers, and then the camera cuts to her in that dress, looking down at a fire where she is burning the gákti as the light from the flames is flickering on her face. The next cut shows us a medium close-up of her gákti being slowly consumed by the flames. We see the fabric changing color and starting to melt. The camera lingers on the fire quite briefly but long enough to create a sense of unease as we witness the burning of something that has functioned more than just clothes, as something that is almost like skin. Discussing the function of skin as a boundary between us and the rest of the world, Maurice Merleau-Ponty famously wrote that one is always on the same side of one’s body.⁴⁵ This notion of skin as a rigid boundary becomes contested in discussions about the porosity of skin that reveal that humans are enmeshed with more-than-human worlds.⁴⁶ In Sameblod, however, the implication of settler colonial politics on Elle-Marja’s body is that the second skin is a rigid boundary indicating something about one’s real skin, and one needs to destroy it in order to be able to pass as and become a Swede. As a child/teenager, she is seen as a not-yet, a not-yet citizen, and, thus, under these oppressive circumstances, she changes the direction of her not-yetness to line up with the children on their way to growing up to become Swedes.

LINING UP AND BECOMING WHITE

While the scenes at the boarding school where the students are lined up neatly by their desks as they answer the teacher’s questions or sing Swedish songs resembles similar scenes in Elina, the visual focus on lining up is much more prevalent in Sameblod. Sara Ahmed writes that whiteness is a straightening device, and when bodies “line up,” they disappear into the “sea of whiteness.”⁴⁷ Discussing the bodily experiences of those who do not approximate “the habitus of the white bourgeois body,”⁴⁸ Ahmed emphasizes that one feels the non-alignment with the ideal white bodies spatially and bodily; one feels that standing out of line, which is uncomfortable in a world where lining up with whiteness is the expected route, and that the discomfort and inability to orient oneself toward objects in the same way that privileged bodies can is reproduced over time and passed on through generations. Both Elina and Sameblod feature a lining up that is forced and administered by institutions, represented by the school system in these two films. The children have to physically line up in order to be straightened into Swedishness and whiteness. At the same time, becoming Swedish is not fully available for either the Tornedalians or the Sámi (who experience a more regulated denial) because they were perceived to be inferior races at that time. In both films lining up is charged with fear or shame, as the teacher is walking around the classroom and punishing those who speak Sámi languages or Meänkieli/Finnish or have not finished their homework. Sameblod features a variety of sequences with the physical act of lining up: The children are walking in a line behind the teacher to the school building, or they are lined up to greet the visitors who are there to measure their skulls and take photographs of their bodies. The latter sequence begins with the visitors arriving in a car and then cuts to two different shots of the Sámi children standing in a line, first in a medium shot and then a long shot that accentuates the straightness of the line. The visitors then move down the line, touching some of the children’s clothing or hair and making comments such as “Such fair hair. Not bristly at all.” Accentuating the sound of surprise in this comment, the film stresses that looks are not always enough to be straightened into whiteness: Despite standing in a straight line and looking like white Swedes, the Sámi children are continuously reminded that they are not quite in line with whiteness. Soon after this sequence, there is another shot of lining up in one of the film’s most unsettling scenes, where the visiting scientists measure the children’s skulls and take naked photographs of them. After the camera has shown them measuring Elle-Marja’s head and forcing her to remove her clothes for the photographs, other children stand in a line to be photographed. In these examples, lining up becomes a painful reminder of the children’s difference from normative Swedishness.

Throughout the first third of the film, Elle-Marja is depicted as a child who willingly aligns herself with the expectations and norms at the school, and she expresses a desire to become a teacher, similarly to their Swedish teacher. After realizing that she does not have any other choice but to live in the segregated Sámi community, however, she rejects this expected trajectory for her growing up as a Sámi (in settler colonial terms). As brought out earlier, growing up is closely connected with becoming in the rhetoric around childhood. One is expected to inherit likeness to one’s family, to reproduce certain genealogies of descent, and to become affiliated with a group, often a nation-state or a minority culture. One of the prominent examples of the implications of this expectation for Elle-Marja in Sameblod is the sequence where Elle-Marja is having breakfast with Niklas at his house after she has spent her first night in Uppsala there. Niklas’s parents ask him to come to the other room, which we can see through the glass door between them and Elle-Marja. The camera positions Elle-Marja in a close-up shot in the foreground, and as we see that the door is not fully closed, we know she can hear what they say. Niklas’s parents express their concern that Niklas has not thought through his relationship with Elle-Marja/Christina and that although it might be difficult to live in the northern areas of Sweden, there are resources for the Sámi people there. The main concern along with these points that Niklas’s mother brings up is that Elle-Marja/Christina might become or already be pregnant. When Niklas negates the possibility of that, his mother says he does not know what Elle-Marja/Christina is after.

Elle-Marja/Christina is seen here through Niklas’s mother’s eyes as a threat to the expected trajectories of reproduction, which in the 1930s in Sweden emphasized the importance of reproducing the white Swedish nation. The implications of this are similar to how Mary Zaborskis describes the experiences of Indigenous children in North America where they function as racialized queer children and are, differently from innocent white children who are free of a past, seen as having a past and therefore “barred from the future, and this barring is enacted precisely through promising futurity.”⁴⁹ Niklas’s mother suggests that the only possible future for Elle-Marja/Christina is in Sápmi because, as the settler colonial state has structured it, there are resources for her there. Those resources would, of course, ensure that Elle-Marja does not fully line up with whiteness and Swedishness. This encounter with Niklas’s parents shows Elle-Marja that she has not yet been successful in passing as a Swede, but because of her age she is able to enroll in the girls’ school in Uppsala under the name of Christina Lajler from Germany. This means she can learn the necessary techniques and knowledge that she does not yet have in order to later successfully pass as a Swede. Passing is not becoming, Sara Ahmed argues, because assuming the image of another does not erase the history and identity that one already has. Sameblod, however, ponders an experience where passing is very close to becoming. In her growing up and becoming an adult, Elle-Marja/Christina performs and takes on another identity that includes a different name and a different skin. This also means she rejects the straight line of descent that she is expected to follow as a segregated Sámi in 1930s Sweden. She resists growing up in the rigid line that is defined by the colonial politics of Sweden and enforced by both the majority of Swedes and the Sámi communities at that time. The only way to do that, however, is to line up with normative Swedishness, which means an erasure of her Sámi identity and thus effectively functions as the kind of elimination by the settler colonial politics that the Sámi people who were not allowed to continue herding reindeer experienced.

While the opening sequences that show us Christina reluctantly attending her sister’s funeral and sitting at a bar at the hotel, agreeing with the derogatory comments that other Swedish tourists make about the Sámi people, the closing sequence of the film imagines a possible resolution for Christina/Elle-Marja that seeks to untie the line of whiteness/Swedishness. Differently from the resolution in Elina that ties nicely most of the loose ends (except for the one about Anton and other children), Sameblod imagines Christina first going to the church and asking forgiveness from her dead sister. Then she climbs up the mountains and arrives at a site where some Sámi people have gathered to mark the reindeer calves. We see her looking around, getting closer to the site, and the closing sequence ends with Christina/Elle-Marja in a close-up profile shot with the background in shallow focus. She is again looking at something that the audience does not see in this take, which lasts for a few seconds until a cut to the credits. With this ending, the film emphasizes that although there might be a resolution for Elle-Marja/Christina, it is not made available for the audiences watching the film to consume.

Both Elina and Sameblod foreground child figures who experience racialization and oppression in the Swedish welfare state because of their not-quiteness. Both films portray these children as eventually on the trajectory to becoming Swedes. The implications and requirements for that to happen, however, are radically different. This shows us, on one hand, the significant changes in historical contexts and racial hierarchies regarding the Indigenous Sámi people in the 1930s and the Tornedalian-speakers in the 1950s. It also demonstrates the different cinematic approaches to representing and resolving experiences of not-quiteness and racialization. The child figures in these films provide in-depth engagement with what it means to line up with Swedishness. Furthermore, they trouble the construction of a fictional child who makes visible problems in the Swedish welfare state. Even though both films imagine children who do line up with Swedishness, they also suggest the impossibility of that endeavor. In the following chapter, I engage with texts that emphasize the failure to line up, exploring possible alternatives to growing/lining up that failure might provide.