Marja Viitahuhta & Ánnámáret’s Vuoiŋŋat (Spirits) was awarded the Best Audiovisual Experimental Short at the Minikino Film Week – Bali International Short Film Festival, which took place in September 2026. The jury noted: “Through its striking experimentation with animated archival drawings, layered sound design, electronic textures, native instrumentation, and the living force of yoik, or age-old Sámi vocal practice, the film transforms catastrophic colonial histories of violence and displacement into a sensorial encounter with memory and presence. For refusing the outsider’s expectation that Indigenous art belongs to the past, and for asserting it instead as radically contemporary, alive in the present and inventive as a form.”

The film also previously won the Best Nordic Art Film award at the Minimalen Short Film Festival 2026.

Vuoiŋŋat (2025) is a cameraless animation by visual artist and filmmaker Marja Viitahuhta, bringing to life the 1839 drawings of northern lights by French illustrator Louis Bévalet, drawn in the Alta region in Sápmi. This digital space is filled by the sound of the indigenous Sámi musician Ánnámáret yoiking the homeless spirits – Vuoiŋŋat – and her luohti is accompanied by Ilkka Heinonen’s jouhikko aka carelian bowed lyre and electronic music by Turkka Inkilä.

The work is dedicated to the memory of the Sámi ancestors who were exhumed from their graves in burial grounds in Sápmi approximately 100–150 years ago in the name of research carried out for racist reasons. Some of the remains have only recently been reburied in Sápmi.