Wherever When Arina Kleist was little, there was almost always a ball present.
When she came home from her very first handball practice in Qaqortup Timersortarfia, she told her mother that it wasn’t for her
That time 7-year-old Arina Kleist was frustrated by all the tricks and feints she couldn’t figure out.
Things take time, were the words from the mother.
– You have to try again and again before you become good, and you cannot become the very best from day one, Arina Kleist echoes her mother’s words.
She showed up for training again. And again. And she discovered that her mother was right.
– I have adopted that way of thinking in my life; that you shouldn’t give up right away just because you haven’t become world champion. That you learn things along the way, says Arina Kleist.
However, handball never ended up being her favorite sport. On the other hand, football quickly gained a big place in her heart.
‘Her soccer girl’ Arina Kleist quickly became known as.
But at a football match in Aalborg in 2011, a wrong twist with the leg was the beginning of the end for the sanctuary that Arina Kleist had always found in sport. From here she had to look for a new one.
Belonged in the hall
Arina Kleist’s parents are both from Nanortalik.
She herself was born in Nuuk in 1986. When her parents separated two years later, Arina Kleist moved with her mother and older sister to Uummannaq, where they lived for five years. In 1993, when she was seven years old, the family moved to Qaqortoq, back to South Greenland and the family’s roots.
Sports filled a lot in the childhood home – even before Arina Kleist herself started going to handball and football training. Her mother played a lot of badminton, and often took her two daughters to the hall when she had to train in the evening.
Under the roof of the sports hall, between plastic chairs and in the fumes of barbecue, sweat and excitement, Arina Kleist felt safe. When she was about eight years old, she started soccer training herself with the boys’ team in the hall in Qaqortoq, while her older sister went to taekwondo in the gymnasium.
She loved football. It was fun and she got better and better.
As a teenager, she joined the women’s youth national team in indoor soccer, and as a 16-year-old, in 2002 she helped win bronze at the Arctic Winter Games, which took place in Nuuk that year.
After elementary school, she traveled to the United States on an exchange stay in Connecticut, where she played a lot of sports. The young people around her talked a lot about the university and the scholarships you could apply for and get if you were good at sports.
She herself ended up applying to the sports college in Horsens, and she got in.
– But at that time I was homesick and needed to come home. So I ended up going to high school in Qaqortoq instead, she says.
Arina Kleist’s mother was a trained primary school teacher, and it was also in the same vein that Arina Kleist was thinking when she started to consider what she should train as in high school.
She loved history and there was something about mediation that attracted her. She ended up applying for a bachelor’s degree in humanistic informatics at Aalborg University, where she could get to work a lot with communication.
While her boyfriend, whom she met while attending high school in Qaqortoq, sailed around as a machinist, Arina Kleist moved to Aalborg in 2009.
During her studies, she continued to play football in one of the local clubs in the city and with the other Greenlandic students. She loved the togetherness and the symbiosis you ended up in when you weaved in and out between each other on the field.
– And it was also there where I could vent my feelings and frustrations, Arina Kleist recalls.
However, she was not as consistent with her training as she used to be – the studies and exams were difficult and required a lot of time and effort. At times she put the football boots on the shelf completely.
Still, in 2011 she ended up on the second team in the club’s women’s team, and suddenly she had to play a match.
– But my fitness wasn’t that good, and I hadn’t strength trained at all. So I just jumped into it.
The cruciate ligament ruptured
The match took place a few days before Arina Kleist’s 25th birthday, 20 June. The sun was shining and she ran around up front on the pitch as a striker.
At one point, when the opponents had the ball, Arina Kleist tried to snatch it from them. As the ball quickly rolled from one player to another, she went after it and turned her body.
– The lower part of my leg just stayed where it was, while the rest of the leg turned around. There I could tell that it was completely crazy, she says.
She could hear something crack inside her knee. Later, the doctor said that the cruciate ligament had been torn – partially.
Arina Kleist stopped playing ball altogether. When, some time after university, she started at Paul Petersen’s Sports Institute in Copenhagen with a view to becoming a sports teacher, she played a bit in connection with the teaching.
But it didn’t work. In the spring of 2013, the cruciate ligament ruptured completely during a handball practice. Arina Kleist was operated on the same year – but that was the end of sports and ball games.
– It’s like losing part of your identity, she says.
– When you are on the field, it is both fun and serious, and you become part of a community. I lost all that there.
Shortly after the knee operation, she moved to the Faroe Islands, where her boyfriend is from. While he was training as a machinist in Tórshavn, Arina Kleist had difficulty finding a job.
She felt rootless – and didn’t quite know what to do with her life.
One day, when she was looking at job ads online, she discovered that they were looking for someone to help organize the Arctic Winter Games, which were to take place in Nuuk in 2016.
She applied for the job, got it and in 2014 moved to Nuuk.
– It was good, but also a bit over the top. Because it was a really good team, and at the beginning I often questioned whether I fit in, she recalls.
But she and the colleagues who helped arrange and organize the sporting event ended up becoming one big family.
– I felt at home.
A film about a forgotten craft
The sporting event took place in March 2016. When it was over, Arina Kleist had to figure out what to do next.
She ended up getting a job as a social media manager at Visit Greenland, where she later ended up helping to produce videos.
Her very first task was an interview with a local tour operator about his relationship with Nuup Kangerlua (Nuukfjorden). As she sat editing the video, she felt a sense of euphoria.
– There was just something that felt really good in my stomach, she says.
While she continued to be a co-producer on the videos for Visit Greenland and her boyfriend continued to sail, time and everyday life passed in Nuuk. She became pregnant and had two children, Ari and Aima. They were busy.
In the end, Arina Kleist did not really thrive in the hamster wheel that she felt the family had ended up in, and they chose to move to Qaqortoq in 2021.
– I love Nuuk, and I like small doses of the big city, cafes and the hustle and bustle. But when I get home to Qaqortoq, I can breathe more calmly, she says.
The downside of pulling up the tent pegs again and moving back to the town of her childhood was that there was no work where Arina Kleist could continue in her track of video production and communication.
So a few months before the move, she decided to try starting her own production company.
In the beginning, it was mostly commercials and various small tasks for the municipality, various companies and other organizations that filled.
But one day an assignment landed on her desk, where she had to interview the then 82-year-old Marie Josefsen about grass sewing – an almost forgotten craft that the women in Josefsen’s family had performed for generations.
The videos had to be made as small tutorials, was to be used for a series of workshops on grass sewing, but Arina Kleist immediately fell in love with Maria Josefsen’s story and the history of the craft.
So while filming the small video tutorials, she gathered material for a short documentary film.
The film was titled ‘Ivikkisartoq Kingulleq’ – The Last Grass Seamstress in English – and was awarded at the Nuuk International Film Festival in 2024.
– I was very nervous and had performance anxiety. But after the screening several people came up to me and said it was really good and thanked me for the film, she says.
The film ended up winning the award for best short film during the festival and was in many ways a stepping stone into the film business for Arina Kleist.
– The film community in this country is not that big, but I have really felt a lot of support and encouragement, she says.
Alongside the commercials and short videos that she continues to produce today, she has gradually been part of many different film projects.
Among other things, she has helped produce the documentary film ‘Qajaq Man’, which won the prize for best documentary at last year’s Nuuk International Film Festival – and which was shown at the documentary film festival CPH:DOX.
At the Copenhagen film festival, Arina Kleist’s own short film ‘Tamatta Ataqatigiippugut’ – We are all connected – was also shown.
– I have been well received, and I am very grateful for that.
Nothing is accidental
When Arina Kleist today thinks back to the match in Aalborg, the injury and the consequences and limitations she still feels today, it cuts to the heart.
The knee injury was a huge defeat.
– I have struggled so much with rehabilitation and with coming back. But I have also tried to realize and accept that I will never ever get back to the same level I was at before.
Now Arina Kleist just dreams of being able to play hyggeball at the old girls level and of being able to play ball with her boy.
When Sermitsiaq’s journalist talks to her, she is in Nuuk to have her knee MRI-scanned.
– It is very exciting what the doctor ends up telling, she says.
Meanwhile, Arina Kleist tries to stick to her mother’s words that things take time and are a process. Today, she is also not sure that she would have found the way to film production if it had not been for the knee injury.
– When I was younger, I sometimes thought that I would like to be more than the soccer girl that people knew me as. I was in a way locked into that role, she says.
– I don’t believe so much in coincidences, I believe more in fate, and maybe it was an injury that was necessary for me to move on with something else.
Although it can be hard to be a filmmaker, Arina Kleist is completely convinced that she is currently on the right track in life. Both because she has found a personal joy and a community in working with films, which she can recognize from the world of sports.
But also because she feels obliged to tell stories about Greenland, told from the perspective of the people.
– It might be easier if I had a traditional 8-16 job with holidays and free travel, but is that what I want? Is that where I can contribute the most to society?
– No, it’s not, she answers herself and adds:
– I’m in my life’s path right now.
