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

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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...
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Sofonisba’s Chess Game review – pioneering female Renaissance artist gets her due

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Documentary analysis of benchmark 16th-century painting is absorbing but focus on a single work misses the chance to reveal an extraordinary life

Like its predecessors from the Ideas Roadshow series, this essay film looks like a high-grade PowerPoint presentation but shines because of its exceptional subject: the pioneering female Renaissance artist Sofonisba Anguissola and her psychologically luminous portraiture. The film is centred on this queen’s gambit: her c 1555 portrait of her three sisters and housemaid playing chess, which clocked up numerous firsts. Apart from being the first Renaissance all-female group painting and the first to juxtapose women of different classes, its most groundbreaking accomplishment was depicting real-life – rather than symbolic or idealised – women.

Narrated by Elizabeth van Sebelle, the film sticks to basic summaries to relay the context. Born around 1532 into a lapsed aristocratic family from Cremona, as the eldest child Anguissola got a fancy Carthaginian first name (her father was Amilcare) and artistic training a cut above the average woman of the time. Initially schooled by distinguished local painters, she impressed Michelangelo in her early 20s when he challenged her to draw a weeping boy. Her artistic apprenticeship was meant in part to bolster her marriage chances rather than to give her a career in her own right – a career she had, nevertheless, becoming court painter to Philip II of Spain, and subtly influencing her peers.

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