question: The sudden outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic influenced many aspects of film production, which is especially visible in the example of local cinematographies. In this article, I investigate pandemic influence on depicting homeland, memory and locality in Sami short films. The primary concern in the pre-2000 Sami short films was the marginalization of Sami culture, as well as tradition-modernization oppo-sitions. However, in the productions from 2020, a switch into the discourse about the homeland and coping with pandemic in the far north is visible. In this article, I describe productions from 2020, dividing them into three thematic categories: films about the return to the homeland, films focusing on lockdown isolation and films based on genre conventions (such as comedy or horror), used for creating a discursive approach to pandemic. In the proposed article, I analyse Sami films from the collection of International Sami Film Institute, produced in Norway, Sweden or Finland.