A woman fights to be both an artist and a mother as Europe descends into war.

It is the year 1939. Europe is marching towards war, but Gerd Osten wants to make films. A sharp-witted critic, ambitious filmmaker and single mother, she moves through Stockholm’s bohemian circles, travels across Europe, encounters French filmmakers and Bertolt Brecht, and believes in cinema as a universal language. Back home, however, her ideas meet the politely closed doors of a male-dominated film industry.

Suzanne Osten’s feature debut “Mamma” weaves an intimate family story from her mother’s diaries of 1939–1944, staged scenes and wartime newsreel footage. The result is both a deeply personal portrait and a restless image of Sweden trying to remain outside the war while living in its shadow. Gerd struggles for the right to be both an artist and a mother, until frustrated ambitions and worsening mental illness begin to take their toll.

One of Sweden’s most influential theatre and film innovators, Suzanne Osten, would repeatedly return to her difficult childhood and her relationship with her mother. “Mamma” is an early and intensely personal expression of that lifelong artistic inquiry: bold, playful and painful, it portrays a woman determined to get behind the camera at a time when the film world was barely prepared to let her in.

Eva Näripea