Movies about teenagers often focus on the common coming-of-age anxieties and insecurities that pose an outsized threat in young people’s lives. Recent films that aim for a realistic look at teenage life usually dwell in realms such as social media, or sexuality, or mental health concerns, or questions of popularity and fitting in. Folktales, a documentary directed and produced by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, is very much a film about teenagers, but it takes all the usual anxieties and simplifies them against the backdrop of dog sledding.
At its surface, the documentary is about a folk high school in Norway called Pasvik Folk High School, where teenagers learn survivalist skills, mainly dog sledding. The film includes many beautiful shots of the Scandinavian winter landscape—crackling fires, the northern lights, icy tree branches, trails packed with snow—as it introduces viewers to the ins and outs of Pasvik. There’s a large focus on dog sledding and the various personalities of the dogs. But the specifics of folk high schools like Pasvik seems like a lesser subject than the journey of the teenagers who attend those schools.
We follow three students who are all, as one of them remarks, caught between childhood and adulthood. There’s Hege, grappling with the sudden death of her father; Bjørn Tore, who struggles to make friends; and Romain, whose deep-rooted insecurity holds him back. The three have different reasons for choosing to attend Pasvik, but they share a sense of feeling lost and unsure of what they want from life. Hege, who first appears while partying with a large group of friends, expresses a desire to get away from other people and find space for herself. Meanwhile, Bjørn Tore and Romain are lonely—they want to meet people, make friends, connect in a way they never have before.
Languidly, the documentary traces through a year at Pasvik, as the students form connections with each other and with the dogs who pull the sleds. One of the faculty members remarks that dogs have the ability to unlock something inside a person, and there does seem to be unique connections between specific dogs and specific students. In one of the saddest turns of the film, Hege’s favorite dog, named Sautso, turns out to have cancer, which brings her back to the tragic death of her father.
The film doesn’t go particularly deep into the actual nature of folk high schools. We don’t spend any meaningful time with students other than Hege, Bjørn Tore, and Romain, and even the faculty and administration of the school get limited screen time. What seems most important is how these three young people find confidence in pushing themselves to take on new adventures—dog-sledding, building fires, and surviving the night in camps they made themselves. The most compelling sections just let the teenagers speak to the camera or to each other, like in a moving scene where Romain sadly tells Hege that he feels she’s good at everything. Her empathetic response is to remind him that she falls over while dog-sledding just as much as he does.
In some ways, Folktales is spiritually similar to something like Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade, exploring young adulthood as an experience more awkward and uncomfortable than exciting or full of possibility. As Romain points out: “It’s like everyone wants to be teenagers except teenagers.” The film stays detached from the adult nostalgia that often colors coming-of-age stories. There’s nothing melodramatic or sensational about the lives of Hege, Bjørn Tore, and Romain; their struggles are very real and often small and mundane. Thankfully, the documentary avoids the moralizing or didactic tone that can often burden similar films. The teens use social media, but it’s not so much a threat to their development as it is a small but constant presence in their lives. They want to be well-liked, but in a way that most people want to be well-liked, only they’re still trying to find the right way to express that desire.
Sometimes it feels like Folktales holds back from going deeper into its world and characters, which can be disappointing. The small-scale approach is great for telling the stories of Hege, Bjørn Tore, and Romain with empathy and respect, but after a while you get the sense that there’s more to the world of folk high schools beyond the natural beauty of their location and the incredibly endearing dogs—only the audience isn’t invited much further in than that.
In place of a more in-depth examination of its subject matter, Folktales has a tendency to sentimentalize. The recurring segments about Norse mythology, weaving, the fates, and finding one’s place in the world, told in voice-over and repeated images of winding red threads, spell out a broad thematic concept that the audience might have observed for themselves. Too often the documentary relies on the overly simplistic idea that exposure to the natural world is great for building confidence in young people, which is no doubt true in many cases, but comes off as one of the least interesting stories Folktales has to tell.
This is clearest when it comes to Romain, who has the most complicated relationship with Pasvik. After struggling with many of the daily activities the school requires, he decides not to return after winter break. Eventually he comes back but continues to struggle with self-confidence. At graduation, he cries and confesses that his year at Pasvik has been incredibly difficult. He admits that if he had known what awaited him at Pasvik he might not have chosen to go. His experience, which points to a struggle that is likely not resolvable within a less-than two-hour long documentary, clashes with the side of the film that insists that the experience of attending a folk high school is uncomplicatedly positive.
At its best, Folktales paints a grounded, nuanced picture of what it means to be a young person. A sequence where Hege and some of the other students get ready for a party and discuss how little their experiences at Pasvik have in common with those of their friends back home is an excellent example of how observant the documentary can be about coming-of-age life. But it also raises questions about all the other young students at Pasvik and the facets of folk high schools that the documentary leaves unexplored.
