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...

Motherboard review – enthralling smartphone self-portrait of family life

Copenhagen documentary film festival
Victoria Mapplebeck’s documentary stitches 20 years’ worth of footage into a home video love letter to her son, whose whole life so far is observed

Victoria Mapplebeck is a British director and lecturer who has worked in film, video, VR, user-generated content, and with her personal, revelatory projects she’s shown a magic touch with a smartphone camera: she won a TV Bafta in 2019 for her iPhone short Missed Call, about her life as a single mum, working out her relationship with her teenage son and his absent dad. Now she has developed this into a tender, intimate, funny and entirely absorbing full-scale feature documentary, the title of which is a reference to the central circuit board on a computer – meaning perhaps both the importance of the digital equipment she’s using to record everything, and her own central importance to the computer of their own family unit, the motherboard that isn’t allowed to go wrong or take a day off.

Motherboard is essentially a home video love letter to her son Jim that crafts 20 years’ worth of footage, showing her own life and that of Jim growing surreally from a tiny baby into a fiercely opinionated, smart young adult who suddenly towers over the parent. The film lasts around 90 minutes, which is about how long the growing up process seems to take in real life for a parent. And at the same time she has to deal with exhaustion, a breast cancer diagnosis, anxiety and her own complex relationship with her father who walked out on the family when she was still young.

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