The film opens in the recent past with an old lady named Christina being obliged to leave her home in the city and return to Lapland to attend the funeral of her sister. The woman is clearly unhappy about having to make the trip and re-encounter the culture she left many decades before. She tells people she’s from southern Sweden and pretends to speak only Swedish, not Sami.
When the story shifts back to the ‘30s, we meet Christina’s adolescent self, whose name is Elle-Marja. Though the girl’s father is dead, she lives comfortably with her mother, reindeer herder, and dotes on her younger sister until the two girls are sent away to a special boarding school for Sami children, where the price of education lies in learning of her people’s inferiority.
