How do you film a bunch of excited dogs running at full speed, while also capturing the anxious teens piloting their sleds? Documentarians Rachel Gra
How do you film a bunch of excited dogs running at full speed, while also capturing the anxious teens piloting their sleds? Documentarians Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing managed to figure it out for Folktales, a novel documentary that’s received a hot reception at Sundance. Their film focuses on the Pasvik Folk High School in Norway, a remote institution on the Russian border where juvenile people are taught to dogsled, as well as how to be self-sufficient in freezing temperatures. Folktales is as much about the dogs—who are very cute—as it is about the concept of folk high schools more generally. These places, located around Scandinavia, are designed for students who have completed secondary school, but haven’t yet fully entered the real world. In focusing on this time between childhood and adulthood, they give their students a unique opportunity for growth.
Grady and Ewing, who are best known for the 2006 film Jesus Camp, are used to observing the vulnerabilities of youth. Here, their cameras hone in on three of Pasvik’s novel pupils: Hege, a juvenile woman who is mourning the death of her father; Bjørn Tore, an awkward boy who worries people don’t like him because he talks too much; and the painfully shy Romain, who at first can’t seem to get a hang of the wildlife skills he needs to make it at Pasvik. It’s not a spoiler to say Folktales is a doc with a ecstatic ending, as all these youngsters emotionally mature thanks to their time with the pups—which include an elderly animal that Hege likens to her grandfather and a jumpy pooch who matches Bjørn Tore in goofy spirit.
After their premiere at Sundance, where they were accompanied by Hege and two of Pasvik’s teachers, Grady and Ewing spoke with Vanity Fair about dogs, teens, and why America should take a cue from this icy venue for learning.
Vanity Fair: When did you first hear about folk high schools?
Heidi Ewing: During COVID I read a book by Blair Braverman, Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube. I was interested in dogsledding. She went to a folk high school, and it changed her life. So the folk high school concept—I didn’t know what it was, if it was still around or anything. It turns out it’s a Scandinavian tradition from the 1840s. There’s still many of them. The idea that a whole culture would be so concerned about that sliver between childhood and adulthood, that there would be so much attention to that tender, shadowed moment when you’re just on the precipice of becoming who you actually are going to be—it was fascinating.
We love making films about youth culture. We’ve done it before. We hadn’t done it in a while, and we’d never turned our attention toward Gen Z. This might be an engaging way to do so in a very far-flung cinematic place. So we began researching it, and then we visited five folk high schools. We landed in Pasvik at the very end. The teachers, Thor-Atle and Iselin, immediately felt what audiences are about to feel, which is that magic touch of someone who believes in you will change your life.
We met the dogs and we just knew between the dogs and the teachers, there was something there. We couldn’t cast the film because the students hadn’t applied yet for the following year. So we were going blind.
Not all folk high schools have dogsledding. Why did you want to focus on one that did?
Rachel Grady: Well, we did our due diligence, and we went to ones that didn’t do dogsledding just because we had to see.
Ewing: Including one that teaches how to live like a Viking.
Grady: But obviously what attracted us to the whole story, one of the things was the dogs, because we both love dogs. And the human-dog relationship is something that we’re both very touched by. But when we actually went to Pasvik, that was when we knew we had a movie. The place seems like it’s stuck in time. It’s like an age-old forest. It looks like it probably looked a thousand years ago.
Ewing: They’re 300 meters from the Russian border. It’s cool as hell. And the winter is like nine-months long. And you ask yourself, “Who chooses to come here?”
How did you think the dogs were going to function in the film?
Ewing: We didn’t know how the dogs were going to function.
Grady: We know how they function for us.
Ewing: We knew that the teachers had an approach, and the dogs were part of this pedagogy. But the dogs were integral to something that they were doing there. Every folk high school in Scandinavia is focused on the character of a human being, becoming a better version of yourself—becoming brave, more vocal. We thought, “Well, that’s interesting,” because—I think this is correct, only the Norwegian folk high schools have this outdoor life, Arctic wilderness, arctic bushcraft, dogsledding line or major.
Norway was a fishing country. It was a humble fishing country until they discovered oil in the seventies. And their identity didn’t just shift when they became a affluent nation. They’re very proud of their relationship with the natural world. They talk about it a lot, the fact that you can camp anywhere on anyone’s property in the whole country. They jealously guard their national patrimony, which is the outdoors and the forest. The folk high schools are infused with that cultural thing, and we’re very interested in those ideas.
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