Folktales: A deep dive into the transformative effect of folk high schools, Arctic wilderness and dog sledding

By Signe Hansen

High above the Arctic Circle, a group of young people trade classrooms and smartphones for sled dogs, frozen forests and a year at a traditional folk high school in northern Norway. The moving vérité documentary, Folktales, follows their daily lives as they learn to mush, care for the huskies and navigate the demands of the wilderness – and their own emotional response to it. Scan Magazine speaks with co-director Rachel Grady before its December release in the UK.

Immersed in a landscape where silence dominates, daylight is a luxury, and soft dunes of snow drop suddenly from trees, Folktales needs no artificial drama. For Grady, the setting was itself a reason to make the film: “Finnmark is beautiful and brutal and pure magic. When you sleep there, it’s dead quiet – no noise pollution – and it resets your nervous system.” The stillness is not decorative; it shapes the students’ daily lives, asking for patience, steadiness and a new attention to the present.

Folktales co-director Rachel Grady. Photo: Charlie Gross

That shift in tempo is central to the film’s emotional world. As Grady explains; “the whole point of it is to slow down and focus on doing one thing at a time. If you’re making a fire in a snowstorm, you can’t think about anything else, and you can’t skip steps. It’s the opposite of that instant brain-zap hit you get from a phone. The work is deep and grounded.” The result is a form of testing that has nothing to do with achievement and everything to do with inhabiting each moment fully.

Folktales co-director Heidi Ewing. Photo: Mei Tao

Tested by life, not exams

Along with the landscape, the unique constellation of the Norwegian folk high school was one of the driving motivations behind the film.

Although the students arrive from different backgrounds, they share a willingness to step outside conventional expectations of teenage life. Instead of performance and speed, they meet repetition and responsibility. Folk high schools offer a pause rather than a programme.

“We were struck with the idea that the folk high school could be a uniquely compelling way to capture that fleeting moment between childhood and adulthood.” In this particular instance, growth arrives through tending to animals, navigating weather and sharing labour, rather than deadlines,” explains Grady’s co-director Heidi Ewing at a Q&A.

The directors visited several northern folk high schools before choosing to film in Pasvik, drawn by its remoteness and its deep integration of outdoor life. Rather than foregrounding the school as an institution, the film first invites viewers to inhabit its rhythm: feeding at dawn, harnesses rattling in the cold air, a hand buried in warm fur before steam clouds vanish into the dark.

Photo: Tor Edvin Eliassen

Filming the silence

As the film progresses, students gradually adapt to the long dark, the physical labour of trail work, and the quiet bonds that form through care. Dogs become not only companions but co-participants in their own transformation.

Capturing this learning process without intruding on it required a different cinematographic approach. “This generation is very used to cameras – but they’re used to controlling them,” Grady says. “We had to make ourselves invisible. We used enormous lenses and filmed from far away so they would stop performing and just be.” That invisibility gives the film its intimacy: emotion surfaces without prompting, shaped by the environment rather than the frame.

Sound, too, becomes part of the storytelling – breath, wind, paws on snow, the compressed hush of deep winter. The absence of commentary makes space for atmosphere to work on the viewer in the same way it works on the students.

A film that lingers

As the year unfolds, inner change becomes visible through outward practice: steadier hands, easier laughter, a deeper readiness for connection. By graduation, the shift is unmistakable – not dramatic, but grown-in. Screenings have been unexpectedly emotional. “People are crying a lot afterwards,” Grady says. “They just want to hug each other. It’s very tender. I think audiences are starved for this kind of connection, and the film gives them a reprieve from everything that feels heavy.”

Premiered at Sundance to warm acclaim, Folktales will be released in UK and Irish cinemas on 5 December. Leaving an oddly nostalgic longing for quietude, it is a film likely to linger quietly with viewers. Do not be surprised if, somewhere between the huskies, the polar dusk and the soft crunch of snow, you find yourself idly imagining a year of your own on the dog trail.