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...

‘You think God didn’t make gay men?’ Comedian Leslie Jones on religion, grief and getting famous at 47

She was Saturday Night Live’s oldest hire, then faced a torrent of abuse after her role in the Ghostbusters reboot. She talks about the deaths of her mum, dad and brother – and why she’s given up dating men

It’s early evening in a photography studio in west London, and the American comedian Leslie Jones is capering about, dressed in a full-length gold lamé ballgown and smoking. “Make me look skinny,” she says to the photographer’s departing back.

“I’m 6ft tall – I can’t cut my feet off,” she says, later. “I can’t stop being a scary motherfucker. This is who I am – let me work with who I am.” Yet, she is the opposite of scary. Statuesque, no question, but whatever she’s doing, whether peering into a bag of fish and chips as if it’s alive, or telling her assistant to read The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho’s trust-the-universe novel, for the 100th time, there is always somebody laughing. She brings an air of deliberate chaos, which you just have to surrender to, wherever the conversation leads, until you find yourself nodding along with the most crackpot conclusion. (The birthrate is low because men spend too much time in hot tubs, and their sperm has become lazy and complacent? “It’s funny, but it’s true. Go look that shit up – I’m not saying something that’s not factual. I hope.”)

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