Teenagers go to the dogs in ‘Folktales'

Washington Post

01-08-2025

'The key that a dog holds to unlocking something inside a person is enormous,' someone says in 'Folktales,' and if that doesn't sell you on the movie, I don't know what will. In fact, if I had a quibble with Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady's moving documentary about teenagers in an Outward Bound-style program in Norway, it's that there's a lot about the people but not quite enough about the dogs.
'Folk high schools' are a Scandinavian invention of the 19th century, created to give rural people free education; today they offer survival-skills immersion for 'anyone seeking a year of independence before adulthood.' Sort of like a gap year where you're tested to the limits of your physical abilities and beyond. 'Folktales' zeroes in on one such institution, Pasvik Folk High School in Finnmark on the border of Norway and Russia, 200 miles above the arctic circle, and introduces us to a group of insecure, urbanized kids who seem as ready to face the frozen north as a bunch of baby ducks.
What makes it easier are the sled dogs for which the students will care and bond with before learning how to hook up teams and ride across miles of ice and snow. They're as motley as the young humans but possessed of the confidence of working animals — they are where they belong and doing what they're meant to do, and part of the lesson for the kids is absorbing that animal assurance, earning the dogs' trust and applying it to themselves.
Most of them seem to need the help. Ewing and Grady don't give us clues about who applies for the folk high school programs and who gets in, but the students we meet are deeply insecure and fearful about moving into a world for which they're not ready. Hege, still reeling from the violent death of her father two years earlier, sums up her existence as 'chaos,' while Bjorn, a big, goofy self-professed nerd, worries that he has no friends because he's 'annoying.'
The most tender of these tenderfoots is Romain, so lacking in self-confidence that he psyches himself out of activities before he can even try them. Granted, the activities include hunting, killing and skinning deer; hiking miles with full packs; and camping out through midnight downpours. The lessons lead up to dogsled runs through the tundra and 'solo nights,' during which the kids venture out into the bitterly cold wilderness with only a canine for company.
'In the beginning, the students think it's all about the dogs, but the dogs are just a method,' says Iselin, one of the teachers. 'The higher goal is the human being. The dogs teach us to be more human.' She points out that we humans still have the same brains we had 10,000 years ago, brains that find modern life profoundly confusing, and the magic of 'Folktales' is in watching Hege, Bjorn and Romain rewire themselves amid the harsh, uncomplicated beauty of their surroundings.
The filmmakers gild this frozen lily with techniques that sometimes amplify the experience and sometimes detract: lots of sweeping ambient music on the soundtrack, long shots and drone shots and a recurring visual trope involving the Norns of Norse mythology, who weave the fates of humans using red thread that winds its way through the film with a poetry that can feel forced.
By contrast, the dogs are simply themselves in their individuality: Guinness, Odin, frisky Billy, shy Dia and old Sautso, whose passing in 'Folktales' is treated with a respect commensurate with his life and in whose fading presence a young adult like Hege can come into her own. The great satisfaction of this documentary is seeing the troubled children of the early scenes emerge with a maturity and equanimity that comes from pushing oneself past the furthest you thought you could go. The dogs, by contrast, never change. They don't need to.
Unrated. At AFI Silver. An occasional cussword. In Norwegian and English, with subtitles. 105 minutes.
Ty Burr is the author of the movie recommendation newsletter Ty Burr's Watch List at tyburrswatchlist.com.