Sundance Breakout ‘Folktales’ Believes in the Healing Power of Dog Sledding

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 new documentary that’s received a warm reception at Sundance. Their film focuses on the Pasvik Folk High School in Norway, a remote institution on the Russian border where young 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 new pupils: Hege, a young woman who is mourning the death of her father; Bjørn, 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 happy 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 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 interesting 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 ancient forest. It looks like it probably looked a thousand years ago.

Ewing: They’re 300 meters from the Russian border. It’s cold 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 rich 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.

There’s a stark difference between the boys you capture, who both struggle at first to find their place, and Hege, the girl, who seems immediately at home. How did that dynamic blossom?

Grady: Hege took to it immediately. We were like, “Oh my God, she’s really good at this.” And she’s just a hard worker. And so we were like, “Uh-oh. What are we going to follow, then?”

Of course, it was so much deeper than that. She was in full mourning; she was working through her trauma over her father. So the fact that she was really good at making a fire was totally irrelevant. Then for the boys, the inability to have relationships with other people was both of their issues in their own way. And the fact that they became friends with each other was totally beautiful.

Ewing: And we couldn’t predict it, actually. Both of those guys were siloed, and we filmed them doing their own thing often. And then, honestly, I remember turning to our director of photography, Lars, and I said, “Did we just film two guys becoming friends?”

The personalities of the kids are so strong, and you match them with the personalities of the dogs. What was it like to watch that happen?

Grady: We thought that that could be the case, but then it just happened. The fact that immediately [Bjørn] was in love with Billy, who talked all the time and couldn’t read the room a little bit and all that stuff. I was like, “This is hilarious.” I told him many times, I’m like, “You guys have the same personality You don’t stop talking.”

Ewing: And the fact that Romain immediately was drawn to the shyest dog in the dog yard, the one who was skittish—you could describe them with the same characteristics. It just proves what people say: People look like their dogs. I have a little scrappy terrier that won’t shut the fuck up, and if you meet me for five minutes, you’re like, “Yeah, that’s your dog.”

How did you film the dogsledding?

Grady: Well, there was a lot of experimenting. We tried different kinds of mounts. We tried different cameras.

Ewing: We thought people had filmed [dogsledding] before, but they film races. Actually, we hadn’t seen an intimate film about sled dogs. It was nearly impossible, honestly. The GoPros kept falling off, getting broken. The mounts didn’t work, the clips don’t work. The drones kept falling out of the sky because it was too cold.

Grady: You can only film them from a snowmobile, but you have to get really close.

Ewing: The big major dogsledding sequence, we had four GoPros on the sleds, which only roll for one hour. Then you can’t put the sound person or the DP on the sled. So we put a sound bag on the sled, and then we were along the side.

Grady: It was like architecture.

Ewing: It was really a technical puzzle. I think it worked out, but I would say barely.

It’s been almost 20 years since Jesus Camp, and here you are making another film about an institution for young people. What do you think is the purpose of the folk high schools?

Grady: I think they have such an incredible purpose. These places exist to help young people figure out how to live in a community, and that you’re part of a group. We’re obsessed with individualism to a point where now we’re lonely. The purpose of [the folk high school] is to help you find your purpose and to help you find your character. It’s so foreign to an American mind that that would be something that you would seek out. You’re not getting a degree; you’re not learning something necessarily that you ever need to do again. It’s just about feeling like you’re part of a community and you can do shit on your own.

Ewing: This is necessary. Parents seem so adrift, and worried about their children who can’t do [anything] for themselves and seem like robots. It’s going back to the most basic way to be a human being, to gather firewood and to push through your fears. You got nobody to run to. You’re out there with another animal. We go back so we can move forward as a society because we’ve hit a wall, as we all know. And so I think that the concept of folk high school, we should all really pay attention to this. It’s so simple it’s deceiving.

Was there anything that surprised you about the way the dogs teach these kids?

Ewing: This type of dog, the Alaskan Husky, live outdoors and they’re raised a certain way. And I found them to be real beasts with a capital B, in a good way. They’re absolutely recognizable dogs and they want affection, but they’re demanding. They had needs. They need to run, they need to exercise, and they want to do it now. If you fall off the sled, they might run off without you because they have needs. They seem very aware that those needs need to be met. They don’t just come to you and snuggle.

So I think it really took a lot more attention for the students. They’re more difficult to satisfy. They need more things, maybe, than your Chihuahua. I think that’s perfect, because you need two hands. There’s no room for your phone. They take a lot of your attention. And that’s probably by design. But these are beasts, wonderful beasts and also very loving, just like the dogs you know.