Pasvik Folk High School – the setting for Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady’s latest documentary Folktales – isn’t a normal school. Located two-hundred miles North of the Arctic Circle and close to the Russian border in Finnmark, Norway, it’s a place where teenagers take a gap year to find themselves before heading off to university or into the workforce full time. But unlike many gap years taken by students backpacking and hosteling in foreign locations, the teens heading to Folk High will learn resilience, survival skills, and self-awareness in the middle of nowhere.
The young people learning under the guidance of principal Ketil and instructors Thor-Atle and Iselin will be trained not only in skills like hunting, construction of a campsite, and other wilderness survival skills, but also in the art of dog sledding. The students will be responsible for the well being of the school’s team of sled dogs, all of them Siberian Huskies. Much like the students, the dogs have their own distinct personalities. Some are calm, some are fun, some are rebellious and unwilling to listen, some are affectionate, some are anxious, and others are a real handful. Developing a bond between the humans and animals helps not only when it comes to learning the ropes of dog sledding, but also on excursions where the teens are sent out into the wilderness on their own with not much more than a knife, headlamp, saw, some camping gear and a canine to help them get there and back.
Located in a portion of the world filled with natural beauty and wonder, this uncommon school gives Ewing and Grady (Jesus Camp, Detropia) an inherently gorgeous and cinematic setting with which to tell their story of teens finding themselves, even amid the infamous wintertime Polar Night, where the region falls into two months of near total darkness. Folktales is built upon the school’s core tenet that these students are there to gain knowledge, wisdom, and the art of storytelling, all seen as gifts from the mythical fates, and the visuals being captured convey a calm, inspiring, and peaceful place where these life skills can take root. Folktales is a visually transporting work of documentary cinema that makes the viewer consider taking such a journey of self-discovery themselves. It looks like a lot of hard work, but also romantic and satisfying.
There’s a steep learning curve when it comes to mastering the art of self-resilience in the wild, as anyone who has tried severe off-grid camping or read Thoreau’s Walden can attest to, and while the instructors at Folk High are there to provide guidance, lessons, encouragement, and counselling, they steadfastly decline to provide additional aid to the students. Naturally, some rise to the occasion, while others falter. Not everyone will make it through their year at Folk High, but they’ll all come out on the other side a changed person.
Instead of being tethered to their phones and constantly worrying about how others perceive them, the students will learn to be comfortable with being alone and feeling at home in their own skin; answering to no one except themselves and living firmly in the present moment without distraction. There’s some homesickness and yearning for creature comforts to be expected, but those maladies are borne from the newness of the experience. The school still has things like group projects, dorms, cafeterias, parties, and other social gatherings, so it’s not a place that promotes anything anti-social. The group bond remains strong, both among the students and with the dogs they care for, with a particularly poignant moment that occurs when a beloved member of the pack becomes seriously ill.
Ewing and Grady settle upon a trio of core subjects to look at the camp’s impact on young people’s lives, all of whom prove to be gregarious and honest about the perceived personal shortcomings that led them northward. Nineteen year old Hege has had it rough for the past two years, following the loss of her father. She doesn’t talk about it much and is mostly searching for a place to be alone and reset herself. Bjørn Tore is the same age as Hege and has major self esteem issues. He’s always afraid that people think he’s annoying (a view of his own self-worth that isn’t helped by his overly blunt father), and finding and retaining friends has been hard for him. Romain, an eighteen year old from The Netherlands, is a self-professed worry-wort and high school dropout who lacks the confidence to see things through to their conclusion on his own.
They’re fascinating people to be around, capable of having deep conversations with the filmmakers and each other. But the biggest question one might have about Folktales comes from the mechanics of Ewing and Grady’s chosen format of storytelling. If the focus of the school is to teach people how to be more self-reliant, what role does a documentarian’s camera play in skewing the honesty of the situation? It clearly has to change the dynamic of one’s time at Folk High to some extent, as the isolation feels less lonely with a camera so close by. But while that question was always on my mind throughout Folktales, the film remains entertaining, and it works on inspirational and aspirational levels.
The journey for the young people at the school often comes down to the repeated process (sometimes literally) of falling down and getting back up again. If they can make their way through some of these tasks, they can do anything, and if they fall short, they will learn to be kinder to themselves in a world that demands and expects so much from them already. In the moment, this feels like it will be the hardest thing they’ll do in their lives, when it’s somewhat gently preparing them for greater challenges in their adult lives. The simple act of loosening up in times of great tension and stress becomes a major victory for the subjects of Folktales. May we all learn something from the stories they share.
Folktales opens at TIFF Lightbox in Toronto, the Hyland Cinema in London, ON, and VIFF Centre in Vancouver, on Friday, August 15, 2025. It opens at ByTowne Cinema in Ottawa on Sunday, August 17. It screens at the Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema in Toronto on Sunday, September 28 (1:00 pm) and Saturday, October 4 (2:30pm).
