Amanda Kernell won the Silver Shell for Best Director at the 74th San Sebastian International Film Festival for her film Brace Your Heart, one of the strongest Nordic showings at this year’s edition. The festival ran from 18 to 26 September, with the awards handed out on the closing night. The film had reached the main competition after screening in the Platform section at the Toronto International Film Festival earlier in the month.
Brace Your Heart is a Nordic co-production spanning Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Iceland and Bulgaria. Kernell cast performers embedded in reindeer-herding communities to ground the story, a process that began roughly three years before filming. Lead actress Elli Sara Valkeapaa was chosen first, with a supporting cast that included Andte Gaup-Juuso, Anni-Kristiina Juuso and newcomer Vincent Niia. The director has said scheduling around the actors’ herding responsibilities shaped the production.
Kernell described a story built around emotional recovery under pressure. “The key words at the heart of the story are ‘liberation’, ‘healing’ and, not least, ‘forgiveness’,” she said, framing the film around how communities cope with trauma when leaving is not an option. She has said forgiveness or love can be what allows people to move on, a theme she wanted to sit at the center of the drama.
The director also spoke of an aesthetic she called an “Arctic western,” using the harshness of the landscape to shape the drama rather than leaning on genre conventions. The approach keeps the emphasis on character and place, with the physical demands of the environment pushing the story forward and the cold, open setting standing in for the wide vistas of a classic western.
The win adds to Kernell’s standing as one of the more prominent voices in Sami cinema, following the international attention around her earlier feature Sami Blood. For the wider Nordic industry, the prize at a major European festival is a marker of the region’s continued presence in art-house competition, and a boost for a film built largely with non-professional actors as it moves toward a wider release across Europe. San Sebastian is one of the leading film festivals in Europe, and its main competition regularly features work from across the Nordic region.
