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...

Four Letters of Love review

Helena Bonham Carter, Gabriel Byrne and Pierce Brosnan feature in sugary story of destiny and dreams, which brings together two troubled young people and a prize painting

Niall Williams has adapted his own international bestseller for this slushy romantic drama set in the west of Ireland, about love and destiny and dreams never given up on. For me, it pushed the bounds of absurdity and melodrama one step too far, though it undoubtedly has an audience. Something here reminded me of the romdram hits of author Nicholas Sparks, and particularly Message in a Bottle – although to be fair it should be borne in mind that Williams published his novel a year before Sparks’ book came out.

Two young lives unfold in parallel, fated to be brought together. Fionn O’Shea is Nicholas Coughlan, whose civil-servant dad William (Pierce Brosnan) has an epiphany at work one day when a lozenge of sunlight is blazoned on his drab desk and he abandons his job and heads west from Dublin to pursue his new vocation of painting. It is around these parts that Isabel (played by the excellent Ann Skelly, from Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy’s Rose Plays Julie) has been traumatised by her brother’s illness and is on the point of being sent away to be schooled by nuns and parted from her kindly parents – poet and schoolteacher Muiris (Gabriel Byrne) and Margaret (Helena Bonham Carter).

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