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‘Folktales’ Review: Anxious Teens Learn New Skills at an Arctic Folk High School
Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady head overseas to make a good-looking, content-lite doc set in the Norwegian wilderness.
With the epic, primal beauty of its remote location, “Folktales” scores high on visual aesthetics, but rates lower on actual content, as the youth characters aren’t as fully-fledged as one could wish and the school experience is not enough of a trial to provide real drama. Premiering at the Sundance Film Festival while California still battles record-breaking infernos, the scenes of the students learning to build outdoor fires that spark and jump unpredictably now play far differently than when they were shot. Cameramen Lars Erlend Tubaas Øymo and Tor Edvin Eliassen deserve kudos for capturing the grandeur of the Northern Lights and the exhilarating and sometimes dangerous pace of a sledge drawn through low-hanging woods by dogs that love to run.
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