Folktales review – taking on tyranny of social media as teens learn to live like hunter-gatherers

In this documentary, high schoolers camp out in subzero temperatures, making their own fires and driving sledges in the wild The Pasvik Folk high school in remote northern Norway teaches teenagers to grow as young adults and escape the pressures of toxic social media by challenging them to get back in touch with their “stone age brain” and live like hunter-gatherers in the snowy wild. This is the subject of a documentary from Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady. Over winter months of almost continuous darkness, the teens cleanse themselves with tasks such as camping out in subzero weather, making their own fires and driving sledges with huskies. Prior to all this of course is presumably a solemn promise to do without their phones, tablets and laptops, although there are no scenes of the kids actually having to surrender these gadgets (this isn’t rehab, after all). They have to swim in icy water; and they make it look like fun. What doesn’t look like fun is the camping out and there is one t...

Hors du Temps (Suspended Time) review – lockdown memoir revives childhood bliss

Olivier Assayas’ thinly disguised autobiographical study of a film-maker’s Edenic experience during Covid isolation is a civilised pleasure

Olivier Assayas’s new film is a flimsy but elegant autofictional sketch about his own experiences during the Covid lockdown, bubbling up with family members in his childhood home in la France profonde. It’s a movie which reminds us that for all the anxieties, this period of enforced inactivity was for grownups of a certain age and financial security not entirely unpleasant – a reminder of the endless, aimless summer days of childhood, an Edenic existence outside time which workaholic media professionals thought never to see again. A kind of miracle.

Vincent Macaigne plays dishevelled film-maker Etienne (very different, surely, from the stylish Assayas), who has come back to the handsome family home of his late parents, staying there with his girlfriend (Nine d’Urso) and communicating with his ex-wife and adored tween daughter on Zoom. He is going to be living there with his brother Paul (Micha Lescot) a music journalist and his new partner (Nora Hamzawi). Assayas uses what appears to be his actual home and in his opening autobiographical voiceover introduces us to the house and grounds - easily the best part of the film, actually - and in further personal sections dispenses with the fiction and talks about the “Assayas” family.

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