Amanda Kernell's 'Brace Your Heart' Sets World Premiere at Toronto, Reveals First Trailer

Amanda Kernell's third feature, Brace Your Heart, will have its world premiere in the Platform section at the Toronto International Film Festival, with a trailer debuting exclusively on Variety. The film will also screen at the San Sebastián Film Festival.

Kernell wrote the script herself and returns to the Sámi world she explored in her earlier films Sámi Blood and Charter. The story follows Ejva, a young woman who inherits her father's reindeer herd after his sudden death and must find her footing within the reindeer community. The local leader Heaika is the only one eager to help her — but he expects things in return.

Playing Ejva is Elli Sara Valkeapää, who had just turned 18 when cast. She is joined by Andte Gaup-Juuso and Vincent Niia, and all three leads are real reindeer herders, according to Nordic Widescreen. That casting choice grounds the film in a world its performers know from the inside.

Kernell herself bridges two worlds: she has a Sámi father and a Swedish mother, and grew up in a village outside Umeå. Her previous work has drawn acclaim for bringing Sámi stories to international screens, and Brace Your Heart continues that line, this time centring questions of belonging, survival and obligation within the reindeer-herding community.

The project was previously known as The Curse: A Love Story. In 2023, it won the top award at the Co-Production Market of Haugesund's New Nordic Films, an industry event where Scandinavian projects seek financing and production partners. The retitled film is produced by Eva Åkergren for Nordisk Film Production, with a broad co-production roster: Forest People, Compass Films, Invictus, Nordisk Film Production Denmark, Filmpool Nord, SVT and Film i Väst. It is a five-country co-production spanning Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Iceland and Bulgaria, per TIFF.

International sales are handled by TrustNordisk, the Danish sales agent that has long shepherded Nordic titles to global buyers. Local distribution in the home territories falls to Nordisk Film.

For a film rooted in a specific Arctic community, the double festival premiere places it squarely on the autumn circuit where distributors and awards voters pay attention. The Platform section at Toronto, launched in 2015, is a competitive programme for directors with a distinct voice and a limited body of work — a natural fit for a film-maker on her third feature.

The trailer, now live on Variety, offers the first public glimpse of Valkeapää's Ejva and the landscapes of Sápmi — the Sámi cultural region that stretches across northern Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia's Kola Peninsula.