Sámi celebration
A Sámi Wedding creator Åse Kathrin Vuolab and producers Nina Figenschow and Eric Vogel invite DQ inside the making of this Norwegian drama about a dysfunctional family attempting to arrange the perfect wedding. Spoiler: It does not go well.
In the Norwegian town of Kautokeino, far in the north of the country, a public meeting was held in June 2023 to discuss the filming of a new television series that would shine a spotlight on the community and its people.
Known locally as Guovdageaidnu, it is at the heart of Sápmi, a region that is home to the indigenous Sámi people and that stretches across northern Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia.
It is also the setting for Heajastallan – Bryllupsfesten (A Sámi Wedding), an eight-part series commissioned by Norwegian public broadcaster NRK that centres on a dysfunctional group of siblings tasked with arranging the perfect wedding without letting their perfect façade crumble.
At the public meeting arranged by the International Sámi Film Institute (ISFI), series creator Åse Kathrin Vuolab and some of the producers met members of the community, before the ISFI later awarded the project funding worth NOK1.3m (US$129,000).
Filming then took place last year, and the series was screened among the Berlinale Series Market Selects at the Berlin International Film Festival in February. It is now set to enjoy its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on Monday, with an NRK premiere in early 2026.
Vuolab started working on a story about a family with secrets back in 2012. Although that project didn’t materialise, six years ago the idea was loosely resurrected and reimagined as A Sámi Wedding.
“I’m happy that [original] idea didn’t make it, because this one is much better,” the writer jokes. “It is still about a family. Now they’re just dysfunctional and trying to make the perfect wedding.”
The story introduces 50-year-old Garen, who finds herself at the bottom of Kautokeino’s social ladder. When her son is to marry the daughter of a wealthy reindeer herding family, Garen sees an opportunity to elevate her own status by arranging the perfect wedding.
But to do so, she must enlist the help of her siblings: gay artist Henry, who hates everything Sámi; outspoken addict Belle; and “village fuckboy” Johan. Across the series, viewers will follow the build-up to the big day, including numerous “rituals” that take place, such as a proposal ceremony and bachelor party, as Garen sets out to host the wedding of the year under the watchful gaze of the whole town.
“Garen is the main character. She is very occupied by how she is perceived, and she’s very intent on keeping the façade,” Vuolab tells DQ. “But when you have these siblings, it’s very hard. She’s trying to up her status with this wedding. Imagine if she can pull it off in one month, she will be legendary. It doesn’t go so well.”
Distributed by Reinvent International Sales, the project is a deeply personal one for the creator, who is from Kautokeino herself. Although she’s only been to one Sámi wedding, it proved to be the perfect vehicle to explore the people and customs within a Sámi community.
“Why are they so dysfunctional? What happened? In a lot of relationships, if they’re poisonous enough, you can’t say, ‘Good morning,’ without the other one suspecting you for being a bitch, so it’s very toxic at times,” she says. “I find the human dynamics very fascinating, and also the psychology around how we can argue with siblings and suddenly become 14 again.”
Vuolab spent four years writing the scripts alone and admits she often found the process “very frustrating” as she turned out draft after draft. “Eventually I was just like, ‘OK, fuck. I don’t know how to do this. These are great characters, it’s a great story, but I can’t clearly do it.’”
That led NRK to bring in two additional writers – Jörgen Hjerdt and Pauline Wolff – to support her work. “They basically saved my love for this show,” she says.
“They’ve done a great job supporting her vision,” continues producer Nina Figenschow. “It was a writers’ room that really worked well with all the respect that there should be for the initial idea and the vision that Åse has. The back and forth, and the loneliness in the beginning, it’s so easy to lose track of your own personal vision, and to trust that this is actually working. Both Jörgen and Pauline really saw her vision and helped her trust herself and strengthen everything that she really wanted to do.”
A Sámi Wedding marks the biggest project of Vuolab’s career and she has been sure to infuse the drama with her “dark” sense of humour. She also steps behind the camera, co-directing with conceptual director Pål Jackman.
“I have to write, even though it’s a bitch. It’s just something I have to do, and I know it’s a struggle and it’s painful at times. I write as a therapy in many ways,” she says, noting how the series layers comedy, drama, social realism and even farce. “In the Sámi culture, we don’t do therapy. We laugh and make jokes. So early on, I wanted to have the audience to laugh at one moment and then suddenly hit them with something really dark, and then some moments later, back to laughter again, giving them a rollercoaster ride.”
She was further supported in writing the scripts by NRK story editor Jan Strande Ødegårdstuen, with the pair meeting weekly to map out individual scenes or entire episodes. “We did that very intensively, and he was crucial,” she states. “Jan was very important for the process, because he supported that the vision should be mine from the beginning. He didn’t want me to have a lot of writers who could come and take over the idea before I knew what I wanted to tell. He was an important supporter and a very wise choice, because he saw that it needed to come from me.”
Figenschow and fellow Tordenfilm executive Eric Vogel came on board the project once it was already in development to support originating producers Mer Film and Sámi prodco Forest People. Though they are both Norwegian, Vogel says every day working on the project has been a journey of discovery into the Sámi people and the town of Kautokeino.
“It’s continued like that for more than two years,” he says. “It was a project that was creatively very much underway, and we brought our skills to try and build the production and help with the financing. This was really a three-part coproduction, which we always said was cross-cultural, instead of cross-border, because it was crucial to have a coproduction also with a Sámi company.”
Behind the colourful costumes and traditions showcased through the story, A Sámi Wedding is, at its foundations, both a family drama and the story of a small town where everyone knows your name.
“Of course, there are like different traditions, but we’re also just regular people,” Vuolab says. “There’s a lot of scenes in the kitchen and they are wearing normal clothes whenever it’s not a traditional setting. Every character is also an asshole at some point, and there are toxic relationships. It’s very fun to torture the characters.”
The public meeting in Kautokeino proved to be crucial not just to let local people know about the show, but to also build contacts with potential collaborators and partners.
“It was important to all of us to connect this story internally in the community and allow it to be something that they could relate to and take part in because we needed lots of extras, lots of people helping out, extra hands here and there, and we wanted as much as those collaborations to happen there locally,” Figenschow says. “So that was a really great investment. But most of all, it was important to us to learn from a very early stage that it is a little bit different to come to Kautokeino. It’s a different pulse, it’s another way of communicating, maybe. We had to learn. Everyone had to learn.”
That meant most of the cast were Sámi, with British actor Craig Stein joining their ranks, while Sámi people also populated every aspect of the crew. Working across such a remote location, planning also had to consider the huge distances between towns to ensure the production had access to everything it needed.
Vogel adds: “It was really also our goal to maximise what we could source in terms of people and vendors and logistics locally. But even though there is a thriving Sámi filmmaking community, there was also less experience with these long-format projects. It was the ambition to try to minimise how many people and how much equipment we actually brought up there.”
“Åse is the initial voice of this story, but to make that dream come true it’s a lot of effort from several people that have trusted her and given her the opportunity to work with people that could also help lift it up,” Figenschow says. “ISFI is a very important local contributor, but NRK has been crucial, with the channel actually coming on board quite early and allowing this to actually be produced according to the original vision.”
With Vuolab already working on a potential second season – “The beauty of weddings is they never go out of style” – A Sámi Wedding could also help to fire up production across the Sápmi region.
“There’s a really bustling, buzzing Sami industry now,” Vogel says. “There are so many Sámi projects coming out, a lot more films and more series than before, and this is the result of a long-term strategic work by the ISFI, with partners like NRK, Netflix and others. This series is part of a wave of productivity from Sámi filmmakers and creators.
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tagged in: A Sámi Wedding, Åse Kathrin Vuolab, Berlin International Film Festival, Eric Vogel, Heajastallan – Bryllupsfesten, Nina Figenschow, Norway, NRK, Reinvent International Sales