Swedish filmmaker Maria Bäck has built a distinctive body of work around subjects that are deeply personal, emotionally complex and often difficult to put into words. Moving between documentary and fiction, Bäck’s films explore mental health, memory, intimacy, family and the fragile boundaries between reality and imagination.
Born in Gothenburg in 1980, Bäck developed an artistic background in poetry, dance and photography before turning to filmmaking. She studied at the European Film College and later graduated as a director from the National Film School of Denmark in 2013. She has since worked across Sweden and Denmark.
From documentary to fiction
Bäck first attracted significant attention with Mother is God, her graduation film from the Danish Film School. The poetic documentary focuses on conversations between Bäck and her mother, who had lived with mental illness since Bäck’s childhood. The film won the Nordic Talents Pitch Prize in 2013, with the jury praising Bäck’s ability to approach a heavy subject with both courage and a distinctive visual language. Mental health would become a recurring theme in her filmmaking, but Bäck’s approach is notably different from conventional issue-driven cinema. Rather than simply explaining a condition, she is interested in how it changes relationships, perceptions and everyday life.
I Remember When I Die
Her first feature documentary, I Remember When I Die, continued Bäck’s fascination with memory and the way people construct meaning around life and death. Set partly in a hospice, the film asks its participants to consider which memory they would choose to carry with them at the end of their lives. Instead of treating death solely as a tragic subject, Bäck approaches it through memory, imagination and the human need to leave something behind. The film premiered in competition at CPH:DOX in 2015 and received an Honorary Mention at the Göteborg Film Festival in 2016. The film was also praised for its formal experimentation, particularly its cinematography, sound design, editing and direction.
Psychosis in Stockholm
Bäck moved into feature fiction with Psychosis in Stockholm (Psykos i Stockholm), released in 2020. The film follows a mother and her 14-year-old daughter travelling to Stockholm for the daughter’s birthday. During the journey, the mother begins experiencing a psychotic episode. As her condition deteriorates and she is eventually hospitalized, the daughter finds herself alone in the city. The story draws heavily on Bäck’s own childhood experiences. Yet she has emphasized that the finished film is not simply a reconstruction of her relationship with her mother. Instead, personal memories became the starting point for a fictional exploration of a particular mother-daughter relationship. That distinction is important to understanding Bäck’s cinema. Autobiographical material is not used merely as confession. She transforms it into something more ambiguous and cinematic, allowing memory, fiction and emotional truth to coexist. Psychosis in Stockholm opened the Göteborg Film Festival and earned Bäck a Guldbagge nomination for Best Director, alongside nominations for screenplay, leading actresses and original score.
A cinema between reality and fiction
One of the defining characteristics of Bäck’s work is precisely this movement between documentary observation and fictional storytelling. Her background as a documentary filmmaker gives her fiction an unusual intimacy. At the same time, her interest in poetry, photography and experimental forms prevents her documentaries from feeling purely observational. She has described her practice as combining different methods, formats and genres, while collaborating closely with her creative team from an early stage. Her films frequently ask questions rather than provide explanations: What happens to a relationship when someone’s perception of reality changes? What remains of us in memory? How much of our identity is created by the stories we tell about ourselves and others?
Brave New Love
In 2026, Bäck takes another step into fiction with Brave New Love, a Danish-Swedish-Greek feature selected for the International Competition at the 2026 Locarno Film Festival. The film centres on Kate, a hypnotherapist who is married to Orla and has a daughter, Athena, while maintaining a deeply romantic relationship with Andreas. As her carefully balanced double life begins to collapse, Kate is forced to reconsider conventional ideas about love, commitment and fidelity. The cast includes Kathrine Thorborg Johansen, Anders Danielsen Lie and Simon Sears. Bäck wrote and directed the film, continuing her practice of using intimate relationships as a way of examining larger questions about identity and social conventions. The choice of subject also suggests an evolution in Bäck’s cinema. While mental illness and family experience were central to her earlier work, Brave New Love turns toward romantic desire, marriage and the possibility of redefining relationships outside traditional expectations.
An uncompromising Nordic filmmaker
Maria Bäck belongs to a generation of Nordic filmmakers who have expanded the boundaries between documentary and fiction. Her films are personal without being purely autobiographical, experimental without abandoning emotional accessibility, and often serious without becoming solemn. From the mother in Mother is God to the dying subjects of I Remember When I Die, the mother and daughter of Psychosis in Stockholm, and the conflicted protagonist of Brave New Love, Bäck repeatedly places intimate human relationships at the centre of her work. What connects these films is not a single genre or subject, but a filmmaking philosophy: to use cinema to investigate experiences that are difficult to explain directly. As Bäck’s career moves further into fiction, Brave New Love offers an important new chapter in that exploration—and confirms her position as one of the distinctive voices in contemporary Scandinavian cinema.
Suggested Online Sources
Dfi.dk
Dfi.dk – Maria Bäck database
Filminstitutet.se: 2021.pdf, 2020.pdf, 2015.pdf
Imdb.com
Vimeo.com
Filmfreeway.com
