Directors: Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady

This engaging documentary charts the life-changing effect of a ‘gap year’ for three troubled nineteen-year-olds attending the Pavski Folk High School in Northern Norway. There the pupils learn to fend for themselves in the Arctic wilderness. Hege is a ‘typical’ Norwegian girl into her smartphone and going out dancing with her pals, still grieving her father who was killed a year earlier. Fellow Norwegian Bjørn Tore is a nerd who confesses he thinks others find him annoying and that he struggles to make friends. Romain is a socially anxious young man from the Netherlands who has dropped out of high school and hoping that the folk school will get him back on track. We follow the three, along with their fellow pupils, as they undergo lessons in hunting, dog sledding and camping. They are even left out to fend for themselves for one night, something Romain in particular struggles with, despite the insistence of his teachers he can do it. There is gentle uplift as the three gradually learn to navigate the great outdoors and their own personal issues. The evocations of Norse mythology do not quite come off, and the editing occasionally borders on the contrived, particularly in the latter part of Hege’s story, but Ewing and Grady’s direction is empathetic and quietly inspiring, and the Norwegian environs are beautifully captured.

David Willoughby

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