It’s billed as “the best years of your life,” the teenaged Romain complains in “Folktales,” the new documentary about teens, sled dogs and the wilderness “Folk” schools of Norway. Socially maladjusted, shy and withdrawn Romain has figured out that the teen years have been over-hyped and oversold by Western culture.
“Everyone wants to be teenagers except for teenagers!”
And if you’re not coping with and thriving in your teens, how’s that transition to “adulthood” supposed to work?
Norway’s thesis — the modern world is a fast-paced/knowledge-packed overload on human brains that haven’t changed since the hunter-gatherer era. Why not offer teens a gap-year school (the first ones opened in the 1840s) where they fill the gap getting in touch with the wild, their ability to cope with it and handle the sled dogs necessary to survive above the Arctic Circle?
It’s hard to overstate just how warm and affecting this film, by “Jesus Camp” and “The Boys of Baraka” filmmakers Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, turns out to be.
The kids aren’t so “troubled” with a capital “T” and this Pasvik Folk School on the Russian border that they attend isn’t Outward Bound. But take a bunch of willing students, socially awkward, sad or “lost,” make them care for, work with and bond with sled dogs with the edict “You are responsible for another living creature,” and keep the kids in the wild long enough and maybe they’ll “wake up your Stone Age brain” and grow up.
Hege is a clubbing but grieving city girl who lost her biker-father, but connects the idea of attending this school with outdoor experiences she experienced with her father.
Bjorn, a self-described “nerd” and “liar” (the film is mostly in English, with some Norwegian and Dutch with subtitles), frets over an inability to make friends and the lonely future that foretells.
And Romain is a Dutch Gen Z stereotype — disengaged, unwilling to even try to learn to build a fire, tentative about literally everything, even bonding with a dog.
That’s a social anxiety that this school can help him with, as dogs “unlock something inside a person,” one instructor observes. The dogs are “just a “method” of helping these teens “find a better version of yourself.” The idea is teach us “to be more human, maybe more patient.”
Nobody has to surrender their cell phone. But over the course of a school year that begins as the midnight sun summer ends, passes through “the long night” of winter and ends in spring, many will find the world they’re in a lot more interesting than anything digital at their fingertips.
Ewing and Grady don’t oversell the transformation these children — some of them plainly pretty privileged — go through. This isn’t a “scared straight” experience, rescuing kids “in the system” from a violent, disadvantaged future.
But watching unhappy, uncertain children grow in confidence as they learn, bond and then run loving, yipping, straining sled dogs is incredibly touching.
They camp out under the spectacular Northern Lights, cope with the consequences of not listening to their instructors about hats and gloves and setting up tents (snow will collapse one if you don’t do that right).
And then as Ewing and Brady pull back to show a parade of kids leading dog teams across the frozen forests of the north, one can’t help but be moved by the beauty of this wild and harsh place and the ingenius idea behind these schools and how much anyone could benefit from that experience.
Rating: unrated, some profanity
Credits: Directed by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady. A Magnolia release.
Running time: 1:46
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